Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Empyre Aff
"Its all part of the plan" - Joker
DEFINITION OF IMPERIALISM ............................................................................................................................. 6 1AC ........................................................................................................................................................................ 7 OBSERVATION 2 - SOLVENCY ................................................................................................................................. 8 OBSERVATION 3 - ROLE OF THE BALLOT .............................................................................................................. 11 OBSERVATION 4 - ADVANTAGES MILITARIZATION IS NOT INEVITABLE - CAN BE REJECTED ................................. 12 MILITARIZATION IS NOT INEVITABLE - CAN BE REJECTED ..................................................................................... 13
*INHERENCY EXTENSIONS*................................................................................................................. 15
INHERENCY EXTENSIONS ..................................................................................................................................... 16 NUK WEAPONS = EMPIRE .................................................................................................................................... 17 BIOPOLITICS = EXTINCTION .................................................................................................................................. 18 BIOPOLITICS CAUSES EXTINCTION. ...................................................................................................................... 18 HEGE = EMPIRE .................................................................................................................................................... 19 AMERICA = EMPIRE.............................................................................................................................................. 21 AMERICA = MULTILATERALISM CONTROL ............................................................................................................ 23 OBAMA = EMPIRE ................................................................................................................................................ 25 US = JUST LIKE OTHER EMPIRES ........................................................................................................................... 26 US = EMPIRE ........................................................................................................................................................ 27 BASES = EMPIRE ................................................................................................................................................... 28 PREEMPTION = EMPIRE ....................................................................................................................................... 31 US = PERMANENT EMPIRE ................................................................................................................................... 32 US = WANTS TO BE EMPIRE ................................................................................................................................. 33 THE U.S. IS ACTIVELY WORKING TO EXPAND GLOBAL DOMINANCE ..................................................................... 33 US =EMPIRE (AFGHAN) ........................................................................................................................................ 34
*IMPACT EXTENSIONS*......................................................................................................................... 54
IMPERIALISM = EXTINCTION ................................................................................................................................ 55 IMPERIALISM = VIOLENCE. ................................................................................................................................... 56 IMPERIALISM = ONTOLOGICAL SLAVERY .............................................................................................................. 57 LANGUAGE SOLVES FOR TERRORISM ................................................................................................................... 58 TERRORISM = WORSE THAN EXTINCTION ............................................................................................................ 59 EMPIRE = BIOPOWER ........................................................................................................................................... 60 HEGE = EXTINCTION ............................................................................................................................................. 61 EMPIRE = MILITARIZATION .................................................................................................................................. 62 IMPERIALISM = VIOLENCE .................................................................................................................................... 63 EMPIRE = PATRIARCHY ........................................................................................................................................ 64 MILITARY PRESENCE = ROOT CAUSE OF PATRIARCHY .......................................................................................... 65 NONVIOLENCE SOLVES PATRIARCHY ................................................................................................................... 66 CAPITALISM = PATRIARCHY ................................................................................................................................. 67 CAPITALISM = PATRIARCHY ................................................................................................................................. 68 IMPERIALISM = HOLOCAUSTS AND FAMINE ........................................................................................................ 69
Definition Of Imperialism
Vassilis K. Fouskas , Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Stirling, The New AMERICAN IMPERIALISM: BUSH'S WAR ON TERROR AND BLOOD FOR OIL, 2005, p. 1
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines imperialism as "the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly: the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence." The Cambridge Dictionary defines the term as "when one country has a lot of power or influence over others, especially in political and economic matters." The American Heritage Dictionary describes imperialism the policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations." The MSN Encarta Dictionary provides a similar definition: "the political, military, or economic domination of one country over another."
1AC
Observation 1 - The State of the Union
Observation 2 - Solvency
We are the solvency. Hardt and Negris solution to Empire is the multitudea collective analysis rejecting and resisting Empire and its assemblages via deconstruction. We claim ourselves as the multitude since we are rhetorically (and therefore actually) resisting Empire. Thus our solvency is twofold: ourselves rhetorically resisting as immanent solvency and our empirical solvency as the warrant for such. Michael Hardt, interviewed by Caleb Smith and Enrico Minardi in The Minnesota Review, 2004 Well, insofar as Empire is oriented toward the structures of power, Multitude tries to talk about the possibilities of resistance. It has two general axes. One is a question about what democracy is today and what democracy could be in a global world, a genealogy of what democracy could mean in a space beyond the national space. But we quickly realizedand this is quite normalthat all of this political theorizing about democracy remains wishful thinking unless there's a subject that can fill it. For us, economic analysis, class analysis, analysis of the forms of labor and new forms of cooperationthose are what give the possibility to new notions of democracy. Those are the two future-oriented lines of the book. What other political forms could democracy take in a global world? Why is it possible today that we can fulfill them?
Alternative --- vote negative to make your ballot relevant by aligning with the global antibases movement: raising consciousness among American citizens about the atrocities of the US empire of bases is a vital first-step for effective resistance to this militarism Grossman 10 (Zoltn, professor of geography at The Evergreen State College, Washington Imperial
Footprint: Americas Foreign Military Bases http://www.dmzhawaii.org/?tag=bases-of-empire) The global proliferation of US bases might cause one to believe that the US military is an unstoppable steamroller that inevitably prevails over the hapless victims in its path, but The Bases of Empire highlights several case studies of successful popular resistance. As Lutz observes, nationalist revolutions or public campaigns have ejected large US military bases from at least twenty countries or territoriesincluding the Philippines, Panama, Ecuador, and Vieques (Puerto Rico)and reduced or modified the Pentagons presence in dozens of other countries. In certain other countriessuch as Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstaneven dictatorial regimes have (at least temporarily) scaled back US bases in the face of public dissent. In 2007, anti-bases activists from around the world met in Ecuador to form the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, committed to ending the presence of all militaries outside their own borders. They met again in 2009 in a Security without Empire conference in Washington, D.C., buoyed by the strengthened citizens opposition to US bases in Italy, South Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic, and other countries. The networks website at www.no-bases.org documents the struggles in each country, and discusses unified strategies and actions to overcome the bases shell game played by the Pentagon, and to prevent the growing global movement from becoming segmented and divided. Lutz does a great service to the global movement by including case studies by anti-bases activists and scholars themselves, who deftly explore the local nuances and complexities unique to their regional situations. The contributors cover Latin America and the Caribbean (John Lindsay-Poland), Europe (David Heller and Hans Lammerant), Iraq (Tom Engelhardt), the Philippines (Roland Simbulan), Diego Garcia (David Vine and Laura Jeffery), Vieques (Katherine McCaffrey), Okinawa (Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato), Turkey (Aye Gl Altmay and Amy Holmes), and Hawaii (Kyle Kajihiro).
Using your ballot to educate about the nature of the US empire of bases is critical to resisting US occupation - this is a vital first step for true reforms Jim Miles 10, Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for
The Palestine Chronicle, Review: The Bases of Empire The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, Foreign Policy Journal, 3-22-2010, This review was originally published in the Palestine Chronicle on March 22, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/03/23/review-the-bases-of-empire-the-global-struggle-against-u-smilitary-posts/ Be informed One of the first steps in protesting and resisting U.S. occupation at least for those not directly in the line of fire, literally or figuratively is to become educated about the nature and principles that rule the world of the U.S. military occupations of foreign lands. The Bases of Empire is a well crafted study and an important contribution to the general understanding of the militarization of the globe and to specific problems as faced by individual groups. Collectively they represent a majority of the people within their regions and will need the support of as many outside voices as can understand their problems and concerns. This book contains a powerful set of ideas and well referenced information to help inform the world of the reality of U.S. militarization of the global community.
If we cannot solve rhetorically acting in the manner of the multitude then the pedagogical importance of debate is lost. We use this vacuole as a space for deconstruction and ethicopolitics: rejecting this notion means that debate is simply an assemblage of the ideologies and institutions of Empire and that we are all doomed. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 47 This is when the ontological drama begins, when the curtain goes up on a scene in which the development of Empire becomes its own critique and its process of construction becomes the process of its overturning. This drama is ontological in the sense that here, in these processes, being is produced and reproduced. This drama will have to be clarified and articulated much further as our study proceeds, but we should insist right from the outset that this is not simply another variant of dialectical enlightenment. We are not proposing the umpteenth version of the inevitable passage through purgatory (here in the guise of the new imperial machine) in order to offer a glimmer of hope for radiant futures. We are not repeating the schema of an ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the name of a promised end. On the contrary, our reasoning here is based on two methodological approaches that are intended to be nondialectical and absolutely immanent: the first is critical and deconstructive, aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitude; the second is constructive and ethico-political, seeking to lead the processes of the production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent power.
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Transversal forms of dissent cannot succeed overnight. An engagement with linguistically and discursively entrenched forms of domination works slowly and indirectly. The effects of such interferences are difficult to see or prove, especially if one approaches the question of evidence with a positivist understanding of knowledge. But transversal dissent is nevertheless real. It enters the social context in the form of what the East German poet Uwe Kolbe called 'a trace element'. 7 It does not directly cause particular events. It engenders human agency through a multi-layered and diffused process, through a gradual transformation of societal values. This process has no end. No matter how
successful they are, discursive forms of dissent, even if they manage to transgress national boundaries, are never complete. There is no emancipatory peak to be climbed.
Dissent is the very act of climbing, daily, doggedly, endlessly. It is not an event that happens
once, a spectacular outburst of energy that overcomes the dark forces of oppression and lifts liberation into an superior state of perpetual triumph. 'Everything becomes and returns eternally', Nietzsche says. 'Escape is impossible!' 8 Even the most just social order excludes what does not fit into its view of the world. Inclusiveness lies in a constant process of disturbing language and rethinking meaning, rather than in an utopian final stage. If
we are to gain and retain a viable understanding of human agency in global politics we must embrace the transversal and the transitional as inevitable aspects of life. Human
agency not only engenders transition, it is itself transition. The role and potential of agency, its ability to open up new ways of perceiving global politics, can be appreciated once we accept, with Rilke, and as a permanent condition of life, that we always 'stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing'. A discursive notion of human agency is grounded precisely in this recognition that there
is
no end to circles of revealing and concealing, of opening and closing spaces to think and act. Revealing is always an act, not something that remains stable. Anything else would suggest a static view of the
world, one in which human agency is annihilated, one in which the future can never tear down the boundaries of the present. Just as the interaction of domination and resistance has no end, efforts at coming to terms with them will never arrive at a stage of ultimate insight. Because discursive dissent operates through a constant process of becoming something else than what it is, a theoretical engagement with its dynamics can never be exhaustive. It can never be more than a set of open-ended meditations. An approach to understanding dissent and human agency thus remains useful only as long as it resists the temptation of digging deeper by anchoring itself in a newly discovered essence, a stable foundation that could bring the illusion of order and certainty to the increasingly transversal domain of global politics.
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Observation 4 - Advantages
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*Inherency Extensions*
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Inherency Extensions
The story of the 21st century will be the narrative of the rise of Empire. Theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have described Empire in detail, and how the increase of biopolitical control will intensify global capitalism and thus domination over all persons. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 9-10 New juridical figures reveal a first view of the tendency toward the centralized and unitary regulation of both the world market and global power relations, with all the difficulties presented by such a project. Juridical transformations effectively point toward changes in the material constitution of world power and order. The transition we are witnessing today from traditional international law, which was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and constitution of a new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus to an imperial notion of right), however incomplete, gives us a framework in which to read the totalizing social processes of Empire. In effect, the juridical transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material bio political constitution of our societies. These changes regard not only international law and international relations but also the internal power relations of each country. While studying and critiquing the new forms of international and supranational law, then, we will at the same time be pushed to the heart of the political theory of Empire, where the problem of supranational sovereignty, its source of legitimacy, and its exercise bring into focus political, cultural, and finally ontological problems. Nuclear weapons are a key component to the expansion of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 346 The panoply of thermonuclear weapons, effectively gathered at the pinnacle of Empire, represents the continuous possibility of the destruction of life itself. This is an operation of absolute violence, a new metaphysical horizon, which completely changes the conception whereby the sovereign state had a monopoly of legitimate physical force. At one time, in modernity, this monopoly was legitimated either as the expropriation of weapons from the violent and anarchic mob, the disordered mass of individuals who tend to slaughter one another, or as the instrument of defense against the enemy, that is, against other peoples organized in states. Both these means of legitimation were oriented finally toward the survival of the population. Today they are no longer effective. The expropriation of the means of violence from a supposedly self-destructive population tends to become merely administrative and police operations aimed at maintaining the segmentations of productive territories.
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Biopolitics = Extinction
Biopolitics causes extinction. Giorgio Agamben, professor of Aesthetics, Verona, HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER & BARE LIFE, 1998, p. 179-80 In this sense, our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to overcome the division dividing the people, to eliminate radically the people that is excluded. This attempt brings together, according to different modalities and horizons, Right and Left, capitalist countries and socialist countries, which are united in the projectwhich is in the last analysis futile but which has been partially realized in all industrialized countriesof producing a single and undivided people. The obsession with development is as effective as it is in our time because it coincides with the biopolitical project to produce an undivided people.The extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new significance in this light. As the people that refuses to be integrated into the national political body (it is assumed that every assimilation is actually only simulated), the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way. And we must see the extreme phase of the internal struggle that divides People and people in the lucid fury with which the German folkrepresentative par excellence of the People as a whole political bodysought to eliminate the Jews forever. With the Final Solution (which did, not by chance, involve Gypsies and others who could not be integrated), Nazism darkly and futilely sought to liberate the political scene of the West from this intolerable shadow in order to produce the German Volk as the people that finally overcame the original biopolitical fracture. (This is why the Nazi leaders so obstinately repeated that in eliminating Jews and Gypsies, they were actually also working for the other European peoples.) Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between ego and id, one could say that modern biopolitics is supported by the principle according to which Where there is bare life, there will have to be a Peopleon condition that one immediately add that the principle also holds in its inverse formulation: Where there is a People, there will be bare life. The fracture that was believed to have been overcome by eliminating the people (the Jews who are its symbol) thus reproduces itself anew, transforming the entire German people into a sacred life consecrated to death, and a biological body that must be infinitely purified (through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases). And in a different yet analogous way, todays democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.
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Hege = Empire
Empire works by using hegemony as power in international relations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 16 In first attempting a definition, we would do well to recognize that the dynamics and articulations of the new supranational juridical order correspond strongly to the new characteristics that have come to define internal orderings in the passage from modernity to postmodernity.25 We should recognize this correspondence (perhaps in Kelsens manner, and certainly in a realistic mode) not so much as a domestic analogy for the international system, but rather as a supranational analogy for the domestic legal system. The primary characteristics of both systems involve hegemony over juridical practices, such as procedure, prevention, and address. Normativity, sanction, and repression follow from these and are formed within the procedural developments. Militarism causes extinction. Betty Reardon, a UN consultant, WOMEN AND PEACEFEMINIST VISIONS OF GLOBAL SECURITY, 1993, p. 21-25 The very weapons we have developed to defend our security are themselves a threat to our security in the potential consequences of their use in combat and in the actual processes of their development and testing. Next, that the basic needs of life will be met. Yet. as
more people of the world fall into poverty, millions are without clean, potable water, housing, adequate food, fundamental education, and health care of any kind. Most of these are women. Inflation is rampant, unemployment is increasing; uncared for children roam the streets of the world's great cities. Third, that human dignity and integrity will be respected, and personal well-being and possibilities for individual and social development will not be impeded by traditional customs, social structures, or political policies at local, national, or global levels. Yet a review of the Declaration of the Convention on All Forms of Discrimination against Women provides a list of a broad and tragic range of impediments to women's personal well-being that still prevail throughout the world. Apartheid and racism in various forms impede the social development of many indigenous peoples .
The arms produced for national defense have been used to maintain racist, repressive systems that deny the personal well being and human rights of ethnic groups and political dissenters. Fourth, that we can be protected from preventable harm and cared for in times of disaster without enduring greater harm, that the life and well-being of the Earths peoples will not be harmed as a consequence of imbalanced security policies, preparation for war, and armed conflict. Yet, in a highly militarized world. local conflicts rage that daily impose death and
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suffering on noncombatants as well as armed forces. The 1991 war in the Persian Gulf and the 1992 war in a disintegrating Yugoslavia took uncounted numbers of civilian lives, produced hundreds of thousands of refugees. and reduced living conditions to circumstances that of themselves were lethal. A flourishing trade in conventional arms fuels the flames of these conflicts and consumes resources in a truly incendiary manner, leaving in ashes people's hopes for even a minimal standard of life. The technological arms race, with its advancing weapons development, has also further diverted resources from social and human purposes as it escalates to the point of the possibility of total destruction. Arms development cannot be relied upon to prevent aggression
and warfare. A case can be made that, on the contrary, arms production and trafficking encourage armed conflict, eroding rather than assuring our expectation of protection or "defense." Each of these expectations has been the focus of major United Nations reports and declarations on development, human rights, the environment, and disarmament and security. But little public heed has been paid. However, women's movements and initiatives are insisting that we must turn our attention to meeting these four fundamental expectations that constitute authentic security. They help to point out that we must attend to the obstacles to these expectations in an integrated, comprehensive fashion based on an understanding of the interrelationships among them. Until we understand the connections among these four expectations and the other global problems deriving from their frustration, neither the world nor any of its people will be secure.
experiences and feminine values are sources of such alternatives. Feminine Characteristics as Approaches to Peace and Security The discussions in this book and elsewhere of the need for women's participation in public affairs are essentially a call to valorize those feminine characteristics that are conducive to peace
Some feminists argue that these characteristics hold the greatest possibilities to move us from the present condition of continuous armed conflict, potential nuclear annihilation, and ecological collapse toward the achievement of a truly just world peace and authentic global security.
and comprehensive approaches to security.
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America = Empire AMERICANS HEAVILY COMMITTED TO MILITARY POWER SEE IT AS INTEGRAL TO IDENTITY
Andrew J. Bacevich, International Relations Professor-Boston University, 2005, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, p. 1 Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys and is bent on perpetuatinghas become central to our national identity. More than Americas matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nations arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.
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AMERICAN MILITARISM HAS LONG ROOTS IN US NOT JUST A BUSH ADMINISTRATION REACTION TO 9-11
Andrew J. Bacevich, International Relations Professor-Boston University, 2005, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, p. 205-6
American militarism is not the invention of a cabal nursing fantasies of global empire and manipulating an unsuspecting people frightened by the events of 9/11. Further, it is a counterproductive to think in these terms to assign culpability to a particular president or administration and to imagine and throwing the bums out will put things right. Yet neither does the present-day status of the United States as sole superpower reveal an essential truth, whether positive or negative, about the American project. Enthusiasts (mostly on the right) who interpret Americas possession of unrivaled and unprecedented armed might as proof that the United States enjoys the mandate of heaven are deluded. But so too are those (mostly on the left) who see in the far-flung doings of todays U.S. military establishment substantiation of Major General Smedley Butlers old chestnut that war is just a racket and the American soldier a gangster for capitalism sent abroad to the bidding of Big Business or Big Oil. Neither the will of God nor the venality of Wall Street suffices to explain how the United States managed to become stuck in World War IV. Rather, the new American militarism is a little like pollutionthe perhaps unintended, but foreseeable by-product of prior choices and decisions make without taking fully into account the full range of costs likely to be incurred.
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is, not as it used to be. It does not make sense to adapt a 19th century concert of powers, or a 20th century balance of power strategy. We cannot go back to Cold War containment, or to unilateralism . Today we must acknowledge two inescapable facts that define our world. First, no nation can meet the world's challenges alone. The issues are too complex. Too many players are competing for influence, from rising powers to corporations to criminal
cartels, from NGOs to al Qaeda, from state-controlled media to individuals using Twitter.
Second, most nations worry about the same global threats -- from nonproliferation to fighting disease to counterterrorism, but also face very real obstacles for reasons of history, geography, ideology, and inertia. They face these obstacles and they stand in the way of turning commonality of interest into common action. So these two facts demand a different global architecture, one in which states have clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division. So we will exercise American leadership to overcome what foreign policy experts at places like the Council call "collective action problems," and what I call obstacles to cooperation. For just as no nation can meet these challenges alone, no challenge can be met without America.{...} It will make it more difficult for others to abdicate their
responsibilities or abuse their power, but will offer a place at the table to any nation, group or citizen willing to shoulder a fair share of the burden. In short, we will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition,
tilting the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world. Now we know this approach is not a
panacea; we will remain clear-eyed about our purpose. Not everybody in the world wishes us well or shares our values and interests, and some will actively seek to undermine our efforts. In those cases, our partnerships came become power coalitions to constrain or deter those negative actions. {...} This is
Building the architecture of global cooperation requires us to devise the right policies and use the right tools. I speak often of smart power because it is so central to our thinking and our decision-making. It means the intelligent use of all means at our disposal, including our ability to convene and connect. It means our economic and military strength, our capacity for entrepreneurship and innovation and the ability and credibility of our new president and his team. It also means the application of old-fashioned common sense in policynot an option we seek nor is it a threat; it is a promise to all Americans. making. It's a blend of principle and pragmatism. Smart power translates into specific policy approaches in five areas: First, we intend to update and create vehicles for
cooperation with our partners; second, we will pursue principled engagement with those who disagree with us; third,
we will elevate development as a core pillar of American power; fourth, we will integrate civilian and military action in conflict areas; and fifth, we will leverage key sources of American power, including our economic strength and the power of our example.
Our first approach is to build these stronger mechanisms of cooperation with our historic allies with emerging powers and with multilateral institutions and to pursue that cooperation in , as I said, in a pragmatic and principled way. We don't see those as an opposition but as complementary.
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A Return to Multilateralism. Since assuming the presidency, Obama has taken a series of symbolic steps to return the United States to multilateral engagement. He has rededicated the United States to the international rule of law by
shutting secret CIA prisons and pledging to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has engineered US election to the UN Human Rights Council; moved the United States from a bystander to a leader on climate change; cemented the G-20
as an ongoing, summit-level forum; proposed improvements to the nuclear nonproliferation regime; and signaled his intent to seek
ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and other long-languishing treaties. At the same time, Obama has emphasized the need for other countries to share global burdens. As he said to the United Nations in September 2009: This cannot be solely Americas endeavor. Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the worlds problems alone. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.1 Rather than take refuge in reflexive anti-Americanism, nations around the world must engage in good faith give-and-take. 2 A Recognition of Security Interdependence. The administrations new era of engagement is premised on the notion that
we live in a world of security interdependence. For much of history, the main geopolitical game has been a competition among
states for relative power. According to the president, that era is drawing to a close. In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game, he told the General Assembly.2 Competition among great powers will increasingly be replaced by the collective management Nevertheless, the administration believes the incentives for global cooperation have never been clearer and the
structural impediments to such collaboration weaker. All major centers of world power, whether emerging or established, have a
strong stake in the largely peaceful current international order, reducing the salience of the security dilemma and breaking the historical pattern of a conflict-prone international system.
Obama administration has made a strategic calculation that working within international institutions is preferable to marginalizing them. Notwithstanding their weaknesses, institutions provide useful focal points that nations can use to modulate their differences and pursue mutual benefits; settings in which to socialize rising powers to existing international norms and rules; standing technical capacities to confront complex problems; opportunities for burden-sharing among nations; and potential vehicles for legitimating American leadership while discouraging challenges to the operative world order. During his presidential campaign, Obama
Reliance on International Institutions. The lionized the architects of the post-World War II order, who had successfully embedded American leadership in multilateral organizations. That generation had understood that instead of constraining our power, these institutions magnified it.3 Candidate Obama pledged to rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security, by updating them to reflect new actors and agendas.4
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Obama = Empire
OBAMA HAS SHIFTED FOCUS OF U.S. LEADERSHIP FROM PRIMACY TO MULTILATERLAISM Stewart Patrick, Senior Fellow Council on Foreign Relations, 2010, The Stanley Foundation Policy Analysis Brief, Global Governance Reform: An American View of U.S. Leadership, February, [http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/PatrickPAB210.pdf] p. 1.
Since assuming office in January 2009, President Barack Obama has trumpeted a new era of engagement for the United States. The central components of his strategy include a world order characterized by peaceful accommodation between
established and rising powers; the collective management of transnational problems; and the overhaul of international institutions to reflect these shifting power dynamics and the new global agenda. Obamas vision presumes an enduring US role in promoting global and regional security, but he places less emphasis than his predecessor on the pursuit of American primacy. Instead, Obama envisionsindeed, insiststhat other global powers assume new responsibilities.
OBAMA OPPOSES UNILATERALISM Zachary Karabell, (Ph.D., Harvard U.), SUPERFUSION: HOW CHINA AND AMERICA BECAME ONE ECONOMY AND WHY THE WORLDS PROSPERITY DEPENDS ON IT, 2009, 290.
Not surprisingly, much of the commentary about the future of the U nited States has focused on the changing nature of
American power relative to the rest of the world. Some have seen the glass half full and emphasized the "rise of the rest" as Fareed Zakaria put it, while others have painted a bleaker picture of an America in retreat and in decline . The election of Barack Obama as president in many ways represented a collective acknowledgment that the relative status of the U nited States in the world has shifted. Unlike the Bush administration, Obama has explicitly acknowledged that the United States can neither manage the problems of the world unilaterally nor solve its own issues in a vacuum.
OBAMA PUSHING GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT Charles Kupchan, (Prof., International Affairs, Georgetown U.), FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Mar/Apr 2010, 120-134.
In HIS inaugural address, U.S. President Barack Obama informed those regimes "on the wrong side of history" that the United
States "will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." He soon backed up his words with deeds, making engagement with U.S. adversaries one of the new administration's priorities. During his first year in office, Obama pursued
direct negotiations with Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs. He sought to "reset" relations with Russia by searching for common ground on arms control, missile defense, and Afghanistan. He began scaling back economic sanctions against Cuba. And he put out diplomatic feelers to Myanmar (also called Burma) and Syria.
OBAMA HAS BACKED OFF UNILATERALISM Jack Snyder, (Prof., International Relations, Columbia U.), AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR: THREAT INFLATION SINCE 9/11, 2009, 42. Contemporary America, too, has begun to retrench after recognizing the counterproductive effects of offensive policies and has begun moderating its preventive war strategy before irreversible damage has been done. The democratic marketplace of ideas, however imperfect, has worked to curb overexpansion.
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US = Empire The United States makes false claims in order to create imperialistic rule over foreign nations
Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, author, 1993 Imperial Alibis, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/Imperial_Alibis.html, Third World Traveler (PDNSS4563) U.S. troops did not land in Grenada or the Dominican Republic order to save American citizens in distress. The intervention is far better explained by the fact that the government of the former and the constitutionalists contending for power in the latter were both nationalistically-inclined and thus a challenge to U.S. economic hegemony in the Caribbean. In Nicaragua, U.S. economic interests were also challenged; and in its effort to crush the Sandinistas, Washington resorted to terrorism and cooperated with narcotics-traffickers. Alliances of convenience were forged as well with drug dealers in Southeast Asia in an effort to defeat the Vietnamese revolution. THE IMPERIAL STATE HAS NOT DISSAPPEARED - -THE RISE OF THE NATION-STATE IN THE WORLD ECONOMY PROVES James Petras, professor of sociology, Binghampton University, EMPIRE WITH IMPERIALISM, October 29, 2001, http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/negri010102.htm
Let us start with Negri's and Hardt's (NH) assertion of the decline of the nation or imperial state. Their argument for a state-less empire exaggerates the autonomy of capital from the state and parrots the false propositions of the free market ideologues who argue that the "world market" is supreme. Contrary to NH, in the contemporary world, the national state, in both its imperial and neo-colonial form, has expanded its activity. Far from being an anachronism, the state has become a central element in the world economy and within nation- states. However, the activities of the state vary according to their class character and whether they are imperial or neo-colonial states.
fundamental areas of political-economic, cultural and economic activity that buttress the position of the imperial powers, particularly the U.S. Crisis Management Over the past decade several major financial and economic crises have occurred in various regions of the world. In each instance, the imperial states, particularly the U.S. state, have intervened to save the MNC, and avoid the collapse of financial systems. For example, in 1994, when the Mexican financial system was on the verge of
In recent years the centrality of the imperial state has been evidenced in collapse, then President Clinton intervened to dispatch $20 billion to the Mexican state to bail out U.S. investors and stabilize the peso. In the second instance, during the Asian crisis of 1998, the U.S. and European governments approved an IMF-WB multi-billion dollar bail-out in exchange for opening their economies, particularly South Korea, to foreign take-overs of basic industries. In the Brazilian crisis in 1999 and the Argentine crisis in 2001, Washington pressured the IFI's to bail-out the regimes. Within the U.S. the threatened bankruptcy of a major international investment bank, led to Federal Reserve (central bank) intervention, pressuring a private bank bail-out. In a word, with greater frequency and with greater resources the imperial state has played a dominant role in crisis management, saving major investors from bankruptcy, propping up insolvent MNCs and preventing the collapse of currencies. More than ever the MNCs and the so-called "global economy" depends on the constant massive intervention of imperial states to manage the crisis, and secure benefits (buy-outs of local enterprises). Inter-imperialist
The competition between rival imperial powers, economic enterprises and MNC's has been essentially spearheaded by rival imperial states. For example, the U.S. imperial state is leading the fight to open European markets to U.S. beef, and U.S. exports of bananas from South and Central America, while the Japanese and the
Competition European states negotiate with the U.S. to increase the 'quota' on a series of exports, including steel, textiles, etc. Trade and markets are largely defined by state to state agreements 'Globalization' is not only a product of the
. The competition between capitals is mediated, influenced, and directed by the state. The markets do not transcend the state, but operate within state defined boundaries. Conquest of Markets The state plays a pervasive and profound role in the conquest of overseas markets and the protection of local markets. In the first instance, the state provides indirect
'growth of the MNC', but largely an artifice of state to state agreements and direct subsidies to export sectors. In the U.S., agricultural exports receive subsidized water and electrical power, and subsidies in the form of tax relief. Secondly, the imperial state, via the IFI, pressures loan recipient states in the Third World, through conditionality agreements, to lower or eliminate trade barriers, privatize and de-nationalize enterprises, thus permitting U.S., European and Japanese MNCs to penetrate markets and buy local enterprises. So-called "globalization" would not exist if it were not for state intervention, nor would the markets remain open if it were not for imperial state military and electoral intervention, political-economic threats or pressure and
. Imperialism takes many forms, but pursues similar goals: the conquest of markets, the penetration of competitors and the protection of home markets. The U.S. has an elaborate set of trade barriers in a wide range of product areas of strategic importance: auto imports are limited by quotas, as are sugar, textiles, steel, etc. A multiplicity of non-traditional constraints and
recruitment of local clients informal agreements limit export countries from entering U.S. markets -- all negotiated on a state to state basis. In many cases, in its dealings with neo-colonial regimes, like Brazil under Cardoso, the U.S. state rejects reciprocity, demanding and securing the liberalization of the information industry while restricting Brazilian steel exports, on the bogus pretext of "anti- dumping" charges.
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Bases = Empire
The extension of bases allows for the expansion of the military-industrial complexs violent domination over the planet - creating racialized, anti-democratic boundaries between the US and dominated peoples Jim Miles 10, Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for
The Palestine Chronicle, Review: The Bases of Empire The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, Foreign Policy Journal, 3-22-2010, This review was originally published in the Palestine Chronicle on March 22, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/03/23/review-the-bases-of-empire-the-global-struggle-against-u-smilitary-posts/ Up until the Bush II administration the denial machine still actively denied the U.S. its rightful position among the empires of global history. Those that did accept empire usually did so with the qualifier of it being an accidental empire, with its main purpose being to save the people, spread democracy, and civilize/Christianize the natives. Empire is denied for various reasons, the main factor argued in is that the U.S. has no colonies and does not have an empirical land base with which to operate within. Lutz provides a very clear definition of empire as when a countries policies aim to assert and maintain dominance of other regions. Those policies succeed when wealth is extracted from peripheral areas and redistributed to the imperial center. This highlights two features of the U.S. empire. First, that while it does not have colonies it does have many hundreds, eight or nine, approaching or exceeding a thousand depending on sources bases that dominate most of the world. The wealth extracted is not so much redistributed to a physical center as Rome, Paris, London as in older empires, but is redistributed to a more amorphous corporate base encompassing the U.S. and the European Union. It can be argued as well that both the U.S. and EU have their own internal arrangements of heartland and hinterland. Corporations One of the underlying themes arising from Lutzs introduction and inclusive within the various essays is that corporations and the military itself as an organization have profited from bases continued existence, regardless of their strategic value. Military liaisons with other countries usually are linked with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as access to oil and other raw materials and investment opportunities. The idea of corporate investment via the military is reiterated throughout the essays. The introduction by John Lindsay-Poland to U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean says the bases there have served explicitly to project and protect U.S. government and commercial interests in the region, and are tangible commitments to U.S. policy priorities such as ensuring access to strategic resources, especially oil and natural gas. Further , the bases serve to control Latin populations and resources. In Iraq as a Construction Site Tom Engelhardt argues that American *U.S.] officials are girding for an open-ended commitment to protect the countrys oil industry. The obverse of this is recognized in Roland Simbulans essay on U.S. Military Activities in the Philippines where opposition to the bases articulatethe possibility and desire for human security and genuine development through their common opposition to neoliberal globalization. He notes that those opposed to the U.S. military bases also consider themselves part of the anti-corporate globalization movement as well. Larger nations are affected as well. Turkeys decision to not participate in the invasion of Iraq brought forth concerns that the price of non-cooperation was regarded as an impossible political and economic bargain for a country that relied heavily on IMF funding. While debating the issue one of the main reference points was the science of economics showing that acting alongside the USA would certainly be in the benefit of Turkey in regard to the wealth of its population. Economics is of course far from being a science, more in the realm of mythology, and the significant factor that most arguments for the military miss have little if anything to do with global/national economics as presented by the Washington consensus. And as exemplified in the case of Okinawa, by Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato, the situation becomes one in which the occupied territory provides a considerable amount of financial aid, which is a cost born by host nations to maintain the U.S. military.
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The state serves to preserve its existence by creating an arbitrary line between friend and enemy. The state uses this line to serve as a justification for the killing of its perceived enemies. Noorani 5 (Yaseen, Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new _centennial_review/v005/5.1noorani.html, The Rhetoric of Security)
In The Concept of the Political, first published in 1932, Schmitt develops the Hobbesian notion of the state of war always in effect among nations. On this basis, he distinguishes the "political" from other areas of human existence by its concern with the preservation of one's existence as such. The agency that exists for the purpose of preserving existence is the state, and its means of fulfilling this purpose is its capacity to distinguish friends from enemies. Schmitt's point of departure is the possibility that some alien group of people may at some time try to destroy the group of people to which I belong. In this case, normative considerations go out the window, and my group of people simply does whatever it can to preserve itself from extinction. According to Schmitt, self-preservation is a primordial fact outside of moral normativity. War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemyall this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction of human life [End Page 18] is not motivated by an existential threat to one's own way of life, then it cannot be justified. (Schmitt 1996, 4849)
The US occupation strategy makes a mockery of international law Jim Miles 10, Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for
The Palestine Chronicle, Review: The Bases of Empire The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, Foreign Policy Journal, 3-22-2010, This review was originally published in the Palestine Chronicle on March 22, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/03/23/review-the-bases-of-empire-the-global-struggle-against-u-smilitary-posts/ International law obviously takes a definite hit under these conditions. Occupation of territory, environmental laws, laws about humane treatment of prisoners of war (Diego Garcia is considered to be a particular spot to which people are rendered), laws and actions of the International Criminal Court are all abrogated or avoided by the U.S. For the indigenous peoples of the Philippines, Hawaii, Diego Garcia, Latin America for that matter all areas with U.S. military bases including the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan all are subject to the U.N. declaration of indigenous rights, and are aware of the rights to self-determination accorded to indigenous peoples under international law. Except for the U.S. who have not signed the declaration, for obvious reasons.
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Preemption = Empire
Preemptive measures come from US imperialism. Kuang and Bonk in 5 (Xinnian and Jim, prof. of modern Chinese literature at Tsinghua University and
prof. of East Asian studies at Princeton, Duke University, Preemptive War and a World Out of Control, 13(1), p. 160-161)pl
Americas invasion of Iraq has damaged the authority of the United Nations and the principle of the inviolability of national sovereignty. Before the war broke out, Bush repeatedly sent out warnings in which he stated that if the Security Council refused to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force, the United Nations would become irrelevant. Some hawks in the administration and conservative newspapers even threatened that the United States could withdraw from the United Nations, bringing it to an ignominious end. The strategy of preemption as espoused by American neoconservatism, along with new
interpretations of sovereignty, will bring about a revolution in the twenty-first century, and the war in Iraq will serve as a model. The United States will use its neo-imperialist imagination in an attempt to recreate the so-called rogue states and restore world order. The strategy of preemption is a sign of Americas abandonment of both traditional Western international regulatory systems and the principle of rule by law as established under the U.N. charter. Instead, America is bringing about the return to an era where naked power takes preeminence. At a
press conference held June 27, 2003, after talks with the French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, Nelson Mandela commented on this shift: Since the establishment of the U.N., there have been no world wars; therefore, anybody, and particularly the leaders of the superpowers, who takes unilateral action outside the frame of the U.N. must receive the condemnation of all who love peace. On a visit to Ireland on June 20, 2003, he went on to say, Any organization, any country, any movement that now decides to sideline the United Nations, that country and its leader are a danger to the world. We cannot allow the world to again degenerate into a place where the will of the powerful dominates over all other considerations.4 The strategy of preemption is not simply a military strategy, but is, in fact, a kind of barbaric politics, a serious attack against civilized humanity. It is ultimately tied to the question of whether the world is seeking civilization and order, or whether it is entering into a period of violence and chaos. The United States adoption of this strategy provoked the intense opposition of Europe and, indeed, the entire world because many believe that a strategy of preemption would take the world in the latter direction. As a result of the IraqWar, a deep rift was opened up between America and its western European allies, to which the media now frequently affix the label Old Europe. Modern history, beginning in 1492, has been a Eurocentric history of colonialism, imperialism, and expansion. However, the United States has
replaced Europe as imperialist colonizer. The imagination of American neoconservative politics has inspired theUnited States to become a tyrannical and self-appointed hegemon, willfully changing global boundaries, and a particularly intense force for the destruction of world order. Europe, on the other hand, has become a force for
rationality and civilization. The dispute that arose between Europe and America during the Iraq War was both a conflict of potential profit and a sign of civilizational disparity.
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US = Permanent Empire
THE U.S. SEEKS PREMANANENT MILITARY AND ECONOMIC DOMINANCE OF THE GLOBE Robert J. Lifton, Psychologist @ Harvard, SUPER POWER SYNDROME: AMERICAS APOCALYPTIC CONFRONTATION WITH THE WORLD, 2003, p. 175
But this "global empire" does not follow previous imperial models,. At the same time it makes clear that, into the foreseeable future, America intends to hold absolute military dominance-one might say omnipotence-on our planet: "The United States," as the National Security Strategy puts it, "must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy-whether state or non-state actor-to impose its will on the United States, our allies, or our friends. We will maintain the forces sufficient to support our obligations, and to defend freedom. Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." Bookman concurs with many observers in describing this strategy as "a plan for permanent US military and economic domination of every region of the globe."
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US = Wants to be Empire
THE U.S. IS ACTIVELY WORKING TO EXPAND GLOBAL DOMINANCE
Vassilis K. Fouskas , Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Stirling, THE NEW AMERICAN IMPERIALISM: BUSH'S WAR ON TERROR AND BLOOD FOR OIL, 2005, p. 29.
As the only superpower remaining after the dismantling of the Soviet bloc, the United States is inserting itself into the strategic regions of Eurasia and anchoring U.S. geopolitical influence in these areas to prevent all real and potential competitors from challenging its global hegemony. The ultimate goal of U.S. strategy is to establish new spheres of influence and hence achieve a much firmer system of security and control that can eliminate any obstacles that stand in the way of protecting its imperial power. The intensified drive to use U.S. military dominance to fortify and expand Washington's political and economic power over much of the world has required the reintegration of the post-Soviet space into the U.S.-controlled world economy. The vast oil and natural gas resources of Eurasia are the fuel that is feeding this powerful drive, which may lead to new military operations by the United States and its allies against local opponents as well as major regional powers such as China and Russia Were any of its adversaries--or a combination of adversaries-to effectively challenge this emerging U.S.-led security system in the region, it would call into question the dominant role of the United States in the post-Cold War era. For the present U.S. administration, the most effective way to secure this system of stability and imperial control is through use of its mighty military machine
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US =Empire (afghan)
Obama is behind an imperialist strategy in Afghanistan Bill Van Auken JULY 18, 2008 Obama outlines policy of endless waR http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9616 Speaking before a backdrop of massed American flags at the Reagan Building in Washington, Obama made it clear that he opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism. What emerges from the speech by the junior senator from Illinois is that the November election will not
provide the American people with the opportunity to vote for or against war, but merely to choose which of the two colonial-style wars that US forces are presently fighting should be escalated. As in his op-ed piece published in the New York Times on Monday, his call on Tuesday for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq was linked to the proposal to dispatch as many as 10,000 troops to Afghanistan to escalate the war there. The thrust of Obamas
speech was a critique of the Bush administrations incompetence in pursuing an imperialist strategy, combined with an implicit commitment to advance the same basic strategy in a more rational and effective manner once he enters the White House.
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members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise
missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.
The military drives imperialism and colonization continued presence will cause inevitable collapse of American institutions Johnson 04 -- Chalmers Johnson, American Bases of Empire, COMMON DREAMS, 1-15-04.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we've allowed into our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to describe the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and senior members of
the Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become part of the new justification for a
major enlargement of our empire -- and an announced repositioning of our bases and forces abroad -- in the wake of our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his
colleagues are supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush's preventive war strategy against "rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have identified something they call the "arc of instability," which is said to run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the world's key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our footprint onto that, we don't look particularly well-positioned to deal with the problems we're now going to confront."
Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions. The only way this is discussed in our press is via reportage
on highly arcane plans for changes in basing policy and the positioning of troops abroad -- and these plans, as reported in the media, cannot be taken at face value. Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying the old French Foreign
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the overriding objective is to demonstrate and consolidate US domination over the system of multiples states. Such purposes help to explain why the US wields such disproportionate military power, why there has developed a pattern of resort to military action by the US in situations ill-suited to military solutions, why massive military action is anything but a last resort, and why the connection between means and ends in these military ventures is typically so tenuous, This war without end in purpose or time belongs to an endless empire without boundaries or even territory. Yet this is an empire that must be administered by institutions and powers which do indeed have territorial boundaries. The consequence of a globalized economy has been that capital depends more, not less, on a system of local states to manage the economy, and states have become more, not less, involved in organizing economic circuits. This means that the old capitalist division of labour between capital and state, between economic and political power, has been
disrupted. At the same time, there is a growing gulf between the global economic reach of capital and the local powers it needs to sustain it, and the military doctrine of the Bush regime is an attempt to fill the gap.
THE ROLE OF MILITARY PRESENCE IS NOT TO CONQUER BUT TO MANAGE THE WORLD. MILITARY PRESENCE IS SOLELY A QUESTION OF A SOCIAL POLITICS SUBORDINATED TO CORPORATE CONTROL JOXE 2002 [Alain Joxe is the leading French specialist in strategic issues. He is the head of a group in sociology of defense at the Ecole des Hautes Civil Wars Everywhere: EXCERPT FROM A DIALOGUE WITH SYLVERE LOTRINGER http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/joxe_interview.html
Given the current state of things, everything that is connected with free trade, with economic neoliberalism, goes Americas way. The State officially intervenes in favor of free trade, but to them it seems like a non-intervention. If you add a little historical depth and political culture here, from the European perspective, you will find it to be a pretty limited way of seeing things. It is obvious, and all the American leaders say so, that this intervention is intended to "shape" [mettre en forme] social and political forms. Shaping is the catchword of the moment: "to shape the world," "to shape Europe" And if this is not politics, what is it? Politics does not disappear, it is merely relegated to "shaping" the political world so that it is favorable to direct action by corporations. This version of things is certainly not prohibited, but you cannot say that it is a non-political policy. It is politics. It is social politics, economic politics, but also military politics. And there is the shaping carried out by a military presence. "Making the state," at the same time, means making the army, the politics and the conditions of the economy. In the encounter between a European project for the Balkans and an American project for the Balkans, normally, there should have been a nice debate that would have been completely real On "shaping" on shaping what do we mean by "shaping." If there is no agreement on what we mean by shaping, there will be confusions, even open conflicts, and in any case, broken-down peace in the projection zones. Exactly. The United States yet has to find their shape. At the moment it might happen through the war in Iraq, Kosovo, etc., or independently of real conflicts in the field. It might not even be shaping a military conception of political strategy. Yes, but we have to suspend our judgement about that topic a bit. If you say that the military is very important, you have to say that it is absolutely fundamental because it represents the threat of death. And the threat of death is essential for creating power. But the problem is that this
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not of course be seen simply in terms of direct military ends. They are always used to promote the economic and political objectives of U.S. capitalism. For example, U.S. corporations and the U.S. government have been eager for some time to build a secure corridor for U.S.-controlled oil and natural gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. The war in Afghanistan and the creation of U.S. bases in Central Asia are viewed as a key opportunity to make such pipelines a reality. The
principal exponent of this policy has been the Unocal corporation, as indicated by its testimony to the House Committee on International Relations in February 1998 (reprinted as A New Silk Road: Proposed Pipeline in Afghanistan in Monthly Review, December 2001).* On December 31, 2001 President Bush appointed Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad from the National Security Council to be special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a former adviser for Unocal in connection with the proposed trans-Afghan pipeline and lobbied the U.S. government for a more sympathetic policy toward the Taliban regime. He changed his position only after the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at targets in Afghanistan (aimed at Osama bin Laden) in 1998 (Pravda, January 9, 2002). During the present war in Afghanistan, the U.S. media have generally been quiet about U.S. oil ambitions in the
region. Nevertheless, an article in the business section of the New York Times (December 15, 2001) noted that, The State Department is exploring the potential for post-Taliban energy projects in the region, which has more than 6
percent of the worlds proven oil reserves and almost 40 percent of its gas reserves. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (January 18, 2002), Richard Butler, of the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledged that, The war in Afghanistanhas made the construction of a pipeline across Afghanistan and Pakistan politically possible for the first time since Unocal and the Argentinean company Bridas competed for the Afghan rights in the mid-1990s. Needless to say, without a strong U.S. military presence in the
region, through the establishment of bases as a result of the war, the construction of such a pipeline would almost certainly have proven impracticable. Blowback
History teaches that foreign military bases are a double-edged sword. The most obvious indication of the truth of this proposition is the present War on Terrorism. There can be little doubt that attacks over the last decade or more directed against both U.S. forces abroad and targets in the United States itself have been a response in large part to the growing U.S. role as a
foreign military power in regions such as the Middle East, where the United States has not only engaged in military actions, even full-scale war, but also since 1990 has stationed thousands of troops. The establishment of U.S. bases in
Saudi Arabia was regarded by some Saudis as an occupation of the holiest land of Islam, to be repelled at virtually any cost. The perception of U.S. military bases as intrusions on national sovereignty is widespread in host countries for the simple reason that the presence of such bases inevitably translates into interference in domestic politics. As the 1970 report by the Subcommittee on Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee noted: Overseas bases, the presence of elements of United States armed forces, joint planning, joint exercises, or excessive military assistance programsall but guarantee some involvement by the United States in the internal affairs of the host government (p. 20). Such countries become more
and more enmeshed in the U.S. empire. U.S. overseas military bases thus frequently give rise to major social protests in the subject countries. Until the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1992, the U.S. bases in the Philippines were widely regarded in that nation as a legacy of U.S. colonialism. Like nearly all U.S. military bases overseas, they brought with them a host of social problems. The town of Olongapo next to the U.S. base at Subic Bay was devoted entirely to rest and recreation for U.S.
troops and housed more than fifty thousand prostitutes.
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the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to "trouble spots" around
and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaao, Korea and Britain, the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory"). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also
In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.
political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites.
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Bases = Empire
Security bases are a motive to start more wars, control global economic competitors, and serve external purposes that keep the status quo with the US as the world leader in everything Lutz 9 (Catherine, Professor of anthropology and international studies at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts page 4 http://www.dmzhawaii.org /?tag=bases-of-empire) It used to be that military bases were built to wage wars, but increasingly it seems that wars are being waged to build bases. After every US military intervention since 1990, the Pentagon has left behind clusters of new bases in areas where it never before had a foothold. The string of new bases stretches from Kosovo and adjacent Balkan states, to Iraq and other Persian Gulf states, into Afghanistan and other Central Asian states. Collectively on a map, the bases appear to form a new US sphere of influence in the strategic middle ground between the European Union and East Asia, and may well be intended to counteract the emergence of these global economic competitors.
In his contribution on US Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism, Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee analyses the reasons for the Pentagons web of foreign fortresses that surpass those created by Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Queen Victoria (p. 51). Gerson notes that bases
do not simply project military force abroad, but have many other functions. These include encircling enemies (such as the Soviet Union or Iran), servicing warships and jets, securing fossil fuels from friend and foe alike, controlling and influencing governments and political dynamics, and serving as training and exercise centres, command-and-control facilities, and more recently as torture centres. In a sense, the bases serve as a tripwire to prevent any real changes to the status quothe United States has to intervene in other world regions in order to protect the bases it has already stationed there. Gerson recalls activists from Guam displaying two maps that illustrated the effects of US bases on their
daily lives. One map showed the islands best fishing grounds, its best agricultural land, and its best drinking water. The other showed the locations of the U.S. military bases, installations, and military exercises. The two maps were identical (p. 53). He also relates the
tragedy of Diego Garcia, ostensibly a tiny British island-colony in the Indian Ocean. All of the islands residents were evicted in the 1960s so that it could be occupied by an enormous US base that has served as a lynchpin in every US Middle East invasion and occupation since that time.
The US uses security bases to justify extinction-causing weapons and project its dominance over the rest of the world Grossman 10 (Zoltn, professor of geography at The Evergreen State College, Washington Imperial
Footprint: Americas Foreign Military Bases http://www.dmzhawaii.org/?tag=bases-of-empire)
Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible but equally unprecedented is the global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is able and willing to attempt to control events in other regions militarily.
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Bases = Empire
US Military bases are modern empire.
Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 10, 2009, http://www.thebulletin.org/webedition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/empire-of-bases
The old way of doing colonialism, practiced by the Europeans, was to take over entire countries and administer them. But this was clumsy. The United States has pioneered a leaner approach to global empire. As historian Chalmers Johnson says, "America's version of the colony is the military base." The United States, says Johnson, has an "empire of bases." Its 'empire of bases' gives the United States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic holdover from the Cold War." These bases do not come cheap. Excluding U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States spends about $102 billion a year to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. And in many cases you have to ask what purpose they serve. For example, the United States has 227 bases in Germany. Maybe this made sense during the Cold War, when Germany was split in two by the iron curtain and U.S. policy makers sought to persuade the Soviets that the American people would see an attack on Europe as an attack on itself. But in a new era when Germany is reunited and the United States is concerned about flashpoints of conflict in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it makes as much sense for the Pentagon to hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies. Drowning in red ink, the White House is desperate to cut unnecessary costs in the federal budget, and Massachusetts Cong. Barney Frank, a Democrat, has suggested that the Pentagon budget could be cut by 25 percent. Whether or not one thinks Frank's number is politically realistic, foreign bases are surely a lucrative target for the budget cutter's axe. In 2004 Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the United States could save $12 billion by closing 200 or so foreign bases. This would also be relatively cost-free politically since the locals who may have become economically dependent upon the bases are foreigners and cannot vote retribution in U.S. elections. Yet those foreign bases seem invisible as budget cutters squint at the Pentagon's $664 billion proposed budget. Take the March 1st editorial in the New York Times, "The Pentagon Meets the Real World." The Times's editorialists called for "political courage" from the White House in cutting the defense budget. Their suggestions? Cut the air force's F-22 fighter and the navy's DDG-1000 destroyer and scale back missile defense and the army's Future Combat System to save $10 billion plus a year. All good suggestions, but what about those foreign bases?
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Language = Empire
Japans English-only policy imperializes indigenous peoples. A Policy on Language Education in Japan: Beyond Nationalism and Linguicism, Reiko Hatori, University of Hawaii doctoral student, Second Language Studies: 23: 2, Spring 2005, p. 45-69 Discrimination in marriage, housing, and employment opportunities as well as abuse of indigenous students in schools is still unresolved (Hitachi System & Service, 2003; Honda, 1982; Nakagawa, n.d.). Although there is an increase in the numbers of educational institutes where indigenous languages and cultures are taught as school subjects, they are small in scale compared to instruction in Japanese and English. There are no heritage language immersion schools. One serious concern for the indigenous students is that they have no choice but to be socialized into dominant Japanese Discourses under the current school systems. Gee (1990) defines Discourse as a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social network, or to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful role (p. 143). The governments insensitivity to rights of indigenous peoples to preserve their languages and ways of being in the face of imposition of Japanese Discourse in schools suggests that the Ainu and Okinawans should be considered victims of Japanese expansionism.
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*Impact Extensions*
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Imperialism = Extinction
Imperialism leads to extinction. Robert B. Porter, Seneca and Professor of Law and Director of the Tribal Law and Government Center, University of Kansas, Chief Justice, Supreme Court of the Sac and Fox Nation, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND REFORM, 1998, p. 11 Nonetheless, this otherwise natural process was dramatically altered by colonization. These colonizing efforts were accomplished by force and often with great speed, producing dramatic changes within Indigenous societies and interfering with the natural process of adaptation and change. This disruption has had a genocidal effect; groups of Indigenous peoples that existed 500 years ago no longer exist. There should be no doubt that their extinction was not an accident it was the product of a concerted effort to subjugate and eliminate the native human population in order to allow for the pursuit of wealth and manifest destiny. As a result, extinction is the most dramatic effect of colonization. Allowed to run its full course, colonization will disrupt and destroy the natural evolutionary process of the people being colonized to the point of extinction.
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Imperialism = Violence.
Imperialism leads to unending violence. William Eckhardt, Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis, JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, February 1990, p. 15-16 Modern Western Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain to benefit itself at the expense of others: The expansion of the culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in Europe was made possible by imperialistic war It is true missionaries
and traders had their share in the work of expanding world civilization, but always with the support, immediate or in the background, of armies and navies (pp. 251-252). The importance of dominance as a primary motive in civilized war in general was also emphasized for modern war in particular: [Dominance] is probably the
most important single element in the causation of major modern wars (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all over the world in this process of benefiting some at the expense of others, which was characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: World-empire is built by conquest and maintained by force Empires are primarily organizations of violence (pp. 965, 969). The struggle for empire has greatly increased the disparity between states with respect to the political control of resources, since there can never be enough imperial territory to provide for all (p. 1190). This disparity between states, not to mention the disparity within states, both of which take the form of racial differences in life expectancies, has killed 15-20 times as many people in the 20th century as have wars and revolutions (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c). When this structural violence of disparity between states created by civilization is taken into account, then the violent nature of civilization becomes much more apparent. Wright concluded that
Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to war The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population The proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase (pp. 246, 247). So far as structural
violence has constituted about one-third of all deaths in the 20th century (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c), and so far as structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and present, then Wrights estimate was very conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then civilization is responsible for one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely self-destruction carried to a high level of efficiency. ... But imperial violence came first, in the sense of creating structural violence, before revolutionary violence emerged to reduce it. It is in this sense that structural violence was basically, fundamentally, and primarily a function of armed violence in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered in the possibility, and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for the benefit of others, nor even of killing all of us to no ones benefit, but of putting an end to life itself! This is surely carrying self-destruction to some infinite power... Life itself may depend upon our choice.
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We have reached a point in human history where the phenomenon of terrorism has to be completely uprooted, not through persecution and oppression, but by removing the reasons that make particular sections of the world population resort to terrorism. This means that fundamental changes must be brought to the world system itself. The phenomenon of terrorism is even more dangerous than is generally believed. We are in for surprises no less serious than 9/11 and with far more devastating consequences. A nuclear attack by terrorists will be much more critical than Hiroshima and Nagazaki, even if -and this is far from certain -- the weapons used are less harmful than those used then, Japan, at the time, with no knowledge of nuclear technology, had no choice but to capitulate. Today, the technology is a secret for nobody. So far, except for the two bombs dropped on Japan, nuclear weapons have been used only to threaten. Now we are at a stage where they can be detonated. This completely changes the rules of the game. We have reached a point where anticipatory measures can determine the course of events. Allegations of a terrorist connection can be used to justify anticipatory measures, including the invasion of a sovereign state like Iraq. As it turned out, these allegations, as well as the allegation that Saddam was harboring WMD, proved to be unfounded. What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would further exacerbate the negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living. Societies would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped up at the expense of human rights, tensions between civilizations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate. It would also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to survive. But the still more critical scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike a conventional war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects the whole planet, we will all be losers.
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Empire = Biopower
Empire produces a system described by Michel Foucault as a system of complete biopolitical control over its citizens. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 88 This passage in the history of ideas does indeed parallel the development of social history. It corresponds to the dislocation of the organizational dynamic of the state from the terrain of medieval hierarchy to that of modern discipline, from command to function. Max Weber and Michel Foucault, to mention only the most illustrious, have insisted at length on these metamorphoses in the sociological figures of power. In the long transition from medieval to modern society, the first form of the political regime was, as we have seen, rooted in transcendence. Medieval society was organized according to a hierarchical schema of degrees of power. This is what modernity blew apart in the course of its development. Foucault refers to this transition as the passage from the paradigm of sovereignty to that of governmentality, where by sovereignty he means the transcendence of the single point of command above the social field, and by governmentality he means the general economy of discipline that runs throughout society.34 We prefer to conceive of this as a passage within the notion of sovereignty, as a transition to a new form of transcendence. Modernity replaced the traditional transcendence of command with the transcendence of the ordering function. Arrangements of discipline had begun to be formed already in the classical age, but only in modernity did the disciplinary diagram become the diagram of administration itself. Throughout this passage administration exerts a continuous, extensive, and tireless effort to make the state always more intimate to social reality, and thus produce and order social labor. The old theses, a` la Tocqueville, of the continuity of administrative bodies across different social eras are thus profoundly revised when not completely discarded.
Foucault, however, goes still further to claim that the disciplinary processes, which are put into practice by the administration, delve so deeply into society that they manage to configure themselves as apparatuses that take into account the collective biological dimension of the reproduction of the population. The realization of modern sovereignty is the birth of biopower.
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Hege = Extinction
Hegemony threatens human survival. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, Hegemony or Survival, 2003, pp. 231-2 Throughout history it has been recognized that such steps are dangerous. By now the danger has reached the level of a threat to human survival. But as observed earlier, it is rational to proceed nonetheless on the assumptions of the prevailing value system, which are deeply rooted in existing institutions. The basic principle is that hegemony is more important than survival. ... Again, that makes good sense if hegemony, with its shortterm benefits to elite interests, is ranked above survival in the scale of operative values, in accord with the historical standard for dominant states and other systems of concentrated power..' One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal frame work as it threatens survival; the other dedicated to the belief that "another world is possible ," in the words that animate the World Social Forum, challenging the
reigning ideological system and seek ing to create constructive alternatives of thought, action, and institutions. Which trajectory will dominate, no one can foretell. The pattern is familiar throughout history; a crucial difference today is that the stakes are far higher.
Bertrand Russell once expressed some somber thoughts about world peace: After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return . No doubt the projection is accurate on some dimension beyond our realistic contemplation. What matters is whether we can awaken ourselves from the nightmare before it becomes all -consuming, and bring a measure of peace and justice and hope to the world that is, right now, within the reach of our opportunity and our will.
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Empire = Militarization
Empire is called into being and asked to use military force. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 15 Once again, the ancient notions of Empire help us articulate better the nature of this world order in formation. As Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus all teach us (along with Machiavelli commenting on their work), Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. All interventions of the imperial armies are solicited by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict. Empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes juridically legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts.
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Imperialism = Violence
Imperialism leads to unending violence. William Eckhardt, Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis, JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, February 1990, p. 15-16 Modern Western Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain to benefit itself at the expense of others: The expansion of the culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in Europe was made possible by imperialistic war ... *Dominance+ is probably the most important single element in the causation of major modern wars (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all over the world in this process of benefiting some at the expense of others, which was characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: World-empire is built by conquest and maintained by force Empires are primarily organizations of violence (pp. 965, 969). The struggle for empire has ... killed 15-20 times as many people in the 20th century as have wars and revolutions (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c). When this structural violence of disparity between states created by civilization is taken into account, then the violent nature of civilization becomes much more apparent. Wright concluded that Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization
can be attributed directly or indirectly to war The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population The proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of
structural violence has constituted about one-third of all deaths in the 20th century (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c), and so far as structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and present, then Wrights estimate was very conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then civilization is responsible for one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely self-destruction carried to a high level of efficiency. ... But imperial violence came first, in the sense of creating structural violence, before revolutionary violence emerged to reduce it. It is in this sense that structural violence was basically, fundamentally, and primarily a function of armed violence in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered in the possibility, and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for the benefit of others, nor even of killing all of us to no ones benefit, but of putting an end to life itself! This is surely carrying self-destruction to some infinite power beyond all human comprehension. Its too much, or superfluous, as the Existentialists might say. Why we should care is a mystery. But, if we do, then the need for civilized peoples to respond to the ethical challenge is very urgent indeed. Life itself may depend upon our choice.
battle has tended to increase (pp. 246, 247). So far as
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Empire = Patriarchy
Military Presence causes Women in the military to be turned into instruments of patriarchy.
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RENOUNCING VIOLENCE IS KEY TO STOPPING PATRIARCHY Luis Gutierrez, March 2006 Reflections on the Social and Ecological Impacts of Religious Patriarchy
Since violence is the fuel that keeps all the patriarchal reinforcement loops going, it follows that renouncing violence would deprive those loops of the fuel they need to keep going. When the patriarchal reinforcement loops are no longer dominant, then the solidarity-sustainability loops can gain strength and even become dominant, and healing from the triple addiction will commence. Healing of the triple addiction will make possible a radical shift from consumerism to human development, and this will further weaken the patriarchal mindset. Who would want to regress from homo solidarius to homo economicus? Who would want to regress from homo solidarius to homo violentus?
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Capitalism = Patriarchy
THE END OF CAPITALISM IS THE END OF PATRIARCHY Heidi Hartmann, Feminist economist, 2006 "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism
Early Marxists (Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin): capitalism will draw all women into the wage workforce and this will destroy the sexual division of labor. Engels attributed the inferior position of women to the institution of private property. He argued that proletarian women were not oppressed like bourgeois women because there was no private property in those families. Women's participation in the labor force was the key to their freedom. Capitalism would get rid of sex differences and treat all equally as workers. Work would allow women to be economically independent. Capitalism would destroy patriarchal relations. Political implications: women must become wage earners before women's liberation can occur and they must join with men in the revolution against capitalism. Capital and property are the reasons women are oppressed just as they are the cause of workers' exploitation in general.These early marxists did not see the differences in the experiences of men and women under capitalism. They did not address the feminist question. They did not see the vested interest men had in women's subordination. Patriarchy is not simply a leftover from pre-capitalist times, it has survived and thrived as a part of capitalism. Therefore, the end of capital and private property will not ensure women's liberation because they do not cause the oppression of women as women.
CAPITALISM PROMOTES SEXISM Heidi Hartmann, Feminist economist, 2006 "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism
Contemporary Marxists/Everyday Life School (Zaretsky): Women are incorporated into an analysis of everyday life under capitalism. All aspects of life reproduce capitalism and we are all workers. The everyday life school is best exemplified by Eli Zaretsky's Socialist Revolution. He focuses on the different experiences of men and women under capitalism and argues that capitalism shapes the particular form of capitalism that exists now. Capitalism created the separation of family and work life and has not included women in the workforce to the extent of men as Engels predicted. Sexism has worsened under capitalism because of this separation of life and women's increased oppression is a result of their exclusion from wage work. Men are oppressed under capitalism by having to work for wages and women are oppressed by not being allowed to work for wages. In fact, capitalism created this exclusion of women because it created wage work outside of the home and requires women to work in the home to reproduce the work force, etc. Z. sees women as working for capital, not for men. The separation of home and work only makes it appear as though women are working for men. This appearance has led the women's movement down the wrong path. Women should recognize that are part of the working class even when they work at home. The housewife is a product of capitalist society. Men and women should work together to reunite the divided spheres and recognize that capitalism is the root of the problem and not fight one another. The end of capitalism, therefore, will mean the end of oppression for both men and women.
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Capitalism = Patriarchy
ROOT CAUSE OF PATRIARCHY IS MEN CONTROLLING WOMENS LABOR Heidi Hartmann, Feminist economist, 2006 "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism
The material base of patriarchy is men control of women's labor power. They maintain this control by excluding women from productive resources (such as jobs that pay enough to live on) and by restricting women's sexuality. Monogamous heterosexual marriage is a recent and efficient way that men control both of these areas at once. Controlling women's access to resources and sexuality allows men to control their labor power to serve men and rear children. This gender hierarchy is learned by the next generation since they are raised by women, and the inferiority of women is taught within and outside the home. The material base of patriarchy is not solely based on child rearing, but on all social structures that allow men to control women's labor.
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Militarism causes planetary annihilation Fred Dallmayr 4 - Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre
Dame, The Underside of Modernity: Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel, Constellations, Volume 11, Issue 1 (p 102120) What Dussel here calls asymmetry is otherwise often called hegemony or else the onset of a new global imperialism (involving the rule of the West over the Rest). In such a situation, nothing can be more important and salutary than the cultivation of global critical awareness, of critical counter-discourses willing and able to call into question the presumptions of global imperial rule. The dangers of such totalizing domination are becoming more evident every day. With the growing technological sophistication of weaponry we are relentlessly instructed about the underside of modernity, about the fateful collusion of power and knowledge in the unfolding of modern enlightenment (as analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer). Coupled with the globalizing momentum, military sophistication greatly enhances the prospect of global warfare indeed of global total warfare (as envisaged by Heidegger in the 1930s). Such warfare, moreover, is profiled against the backdrop of hegemonic asymmetry (as seen by Dussel): the vastly unequal possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. In this situation, the goal of global warfare is bound to be the total subjugation of less developed or subaltern societies a subjugation accomplished through longdistance military offensives capable of inflicting maximum casualties on enemies while minimizing the attackers costs.25 Given the intoxicating effects of global rule, must one not also anticipate corresponding levels of total depravity and corruption among the rulers? In fact, must one not fear the upsurge of a new breed of global master criminals (planetarische Hauptverbrecher) whose actions are likely to match those of their twentieth-century predecessors, and perhaps even surpass them (behind a new shield of immunity)? Armed with unparalleled nuclear devices and unheard-of strategic doctrines, global masters today cannot only control and subjugate populations, but in fact destroy and incinerate them (from high above). In the words of Arundhati Roy, addressed to the worlds imperial rulers: To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people; you rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesnt. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it how easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth.26
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Militarism = Extinction
Militarism ensures planet-ending war Jai Dev Sethi 89, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1989, Gandhian Critique of Western Peace
Movements, p. 174
The strategic doctrines discussed in the preceding pages and others which have not been discussed have to be recognised both as provocations and potentials for war as well as preservers of peace. There can be no denial that in a system based on nation states where size and resources, development of technologies are of critical importance, expansionism is inherent in the system. Therefore, the threat perception arises from security problems which are the products of nation-states system. The balance of power realm of new weapon system, ideological passions and miscalculations and misperceptions along with other factors determine the nature of international climate for war and peace, and the nuclear weapons have been the pyramidical culmination of the progression of all the determinants of war and peace which are euphemistically called defence and security. The real difference between the past and the present is that the nuclear weapons can destroy the whole humanity in a short time. This was not the position before, no matter how big and long wars were fought. But it is also a fact that nuclear powers have not fought a war since 1945. Suppose for a moment all the nuclear weapons by some magic disappeared. How much would the whole world be saved from wars and large scale annihilation? The Second World War took a toll of 50 million people. A third world war without nuclear weapons may not take less than 100 million people at least. A world free from nuclear weapons while other things remaining the same is likely to produce some other kinds of weapons because the global system of inequalities, insecurity of nations, pressures of technologies etc. will inevitably lead to the discovery of weapons probably million times deadlier than the nuclear weapons. The world would never be safe even without the nuclear weapons. The peace movements have been making this mistake of not linking issues of elimination of nuclear weapons with the causes which in the first instance culminated in the production of nuclear weapons.
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Bases = Securitization
Security bases cause environmental destruction, economic decline, torture, neurological damage, and poisoned water supply. Thisin turnmakes the world people feel anything but secure Lutz 9 (Catherine, Professor of anthropology and international studies at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts page 4 http://www.dmzhawaii.org /?tag=bases-of-empire) The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the worlds people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on U.S. military and political
support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases
Security militarization is a sketchy process involving kids younger than you or I joining the military and carrying rifles Grossman 10 (Zoltn, professor of geography at The Evergreen State College, Washington Imperial Footprint: Americas Foreign Military Bases http://www.dmzhawaii.org/?tag=bases-of-empire) Professor Catherine Lutz, someone who has studied the U.S. military bases as sociological phenomenon, gave this lecture in Guam in April last year.
Its a very
uses and impacts from different postions. This passage jumped out at me because it illustrates the militarization that invades not only the land but the very psyche of the people: Militarizationthe process by which 14 year olds are in uniform and carrying proxy rifles in JROTC units around the island, why a fifth to a
quarter of
high school graduates enter the military, and why the identity of the island has over time the process of militarization has been visible to
She is the editor
shifted from a land of farmers to a land of war survivors to a land of loyal Americans to a land that is, proudly, the Tip of
the Spear, that is, a land that is a weapon. This historical change
some, but more often, hidden in plain sight. This should sound familiar to people in Hawaii.
and contributor to a book about the global U.S. network of bases
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Military bases cause environmental problems and degrade relations between the US and the host country. Gusterson, professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University, 9 (Hugh, March 10, http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/empire-of-bases, Empire of Bases, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) These bases can become flashpoints for conflict. Military bases invariably discharge toxic waste into local ecosystems, as in Guam where military bases have led to no fewer than 19 superfund sites. Such contamination generates resentment and sometimes, as in Vieques in the 1990s, full-blown social movements against the bases. ... It is also inevitable that, from time to time, U.S. soldiers--often drunk-commit crimes. The resentment these crimes cause is only exacerbated by the U.S. government's frequent insistence that such crimes not be prosecuted in local courts. In 2002, two U.S. soldiers killed two teenage girls in Korea as they walked to a birthday party. Korean campaigners claim this was one of 52,000 crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea between 1967 and 2002. The two U.S. soldiers were immediately repatriated to the United States so they could escape prosecution in Korea. In 1998, a marine pilot sliced through the cable of a ski gondola in Italy, killing 20 people, but U.S. officials slapped him on the wrist and refused to allow Italian authorities to try him. These and other similar incidents injured U.S. relations with important allies.
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Empire = Unsustainable/Bankrupt US
The U.S. Global Empire will Bankrupt the U.S. Johnson 09 [Chalmers Johnson, president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, consultant for the CIA, author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, led the Center for Chinese Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley,
Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do So 6/30, http://www.commondreams.org/print/45300] ... In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP. Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger , not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity. 2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. .... For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States ."In 1932, in
a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted
U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy. When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people , the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.
on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed. The
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requires the underdevelopment of other nations to sustain its growth, is not a sustainable model for global cultural development. Frasers argument that the rest of the world could one day be just like American culture, and that America could allow this to happen, is nave. Second, Fraser ridicules all paths to global development that provide an alternative to Americas neoliberal prescriptions for culture. Struggles for national cultural sovereignty and the decolonization of culture undertaken by many non-Americans in postcolonial countries through the late twentieth century are reduced to the economic opportunism of bloated union bureaucracies and the political interests of corrupt
party elites. Multilateral approaches to global communicational and cultural development are also unacceptable. The cultural aspirations of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s at U.N.E.S.C.O. are reduced to irrational anti-Americanism and Marxist diatribe. In sum, Fraser reductively dismisses alternative paths to global cultural development that fail to abide by the principles of his neoliberal ideology. But Frasers praise for the universalization of American culture does not stop here. He
advocates the aggressive use of soft power to assimilate cultures that are hostile to American and Western values.91 American soft power must be strategically deployed to pre-empt the end of Western civilization, save the world from the possibility of global anarchy, and defend the U.S. empire and global capitalism from attacks by terrorists.92 The final paragraph of Frasers text typifies the Americacentrism that guides his moralistic rationalization of American soft power: Americas weapons of mass destruction are not only necessary for global stability, but also should be built up and deployed more assertively throughout the world. The world needs more M.T.V.,
McDonalds, Microsoft, Madonna, and Mickey Mouse. Yes, things really do go better with Coke.93
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that the region has [End Page 240] long been a victim of "Western imperialism" is widespread. In this vein, the United States is viewed as just the latest extraregional power whose imperial aspirations weigh on the region, which brings a third factor into play. Because of its interest in oil, the United States is supporting regimes-Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf emirates--whose domestic political legitimacy is contested. Whatever strategic
considerations dictate that Washington prop up these regimes, that it does so makes the United States a lightning rod for those within these countries who are politically disaffected. Moreover, these regimes are not blind to the domestic challenges to their grip on power. Because they are concerned about inflaming public opinion (the much talked about "street"), both their loyalty and utility as U.S. allies are, to put it charitably, suspect. Finally, although U.S. hegemony is manifested primarily in its
overwhelming economic and military muscle, the cultural dimension to U.S. preeminence is also important. The events of September 11 have brought into sharp focus the enormous cultural clash, which inescapably has overtones of a "clash of civilizations," between Islamic fundamentalism and U.S. liberal ideology.
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Hege = Imperialism
US hegemony contributes to imperialism. Foster in 3 (John, editor of Monthly Review, Monthly Review, The New Age of Imperialism, 55(3),
https://www.monthlyreview.org/0703jbf.htm)pl
Imperialism is meant to serve the needs of a ruling class much more than a nation. It has nothing to do with democracy. {...}. The rise
to prominence of the neoconservative hegemonists within the administration is thought to have been brought on
by the undemocratic 2000 election, in which the Supreme Court appointed Bush as president, and by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which suddenly enlarged the national security state. All of this has contributed, we are told, to a
unilateralist and belligerent foreign policy at odds with the historic U.S. role in the world. {...} Imperialism, however, continued to evolve beyond this classic phase, which ended with the Second World War and subsequent decolonization movement, and in the 1950s and 1960s a later phase presented its own historically specific characteristics. The most important of these was the United States replacing British hegemony over the capitalist world economy. The other was the existence of the Soviet Union, creating space for revolutionary movements in the third world, and helping to bring the leading capitalist powers into a Cold War military alliance reinforcing U.S. hegemony. The United
States utilized its hegemonic position to establish the Bretton Woods institutionsthe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bankwith the intention of consolidating the economic control exercised by the center states, and the United States in particular, over the periphery and hence the entire world market. In Magdoffs conception, the existence of U.S. hegemony did not bring to an end the competition between capitalist states. Hegemony was always understood by realistic analysts as historically transitory, despite the constant references to the American century. The uneven development of capitalism meant continual interimperialist rivalry, even if somewhat hidden at times. Antagonism between unevenly developing industrial centers, he wrote, is the hub of the imperialist wheel (p. 16). U.S. militarism, which in this analysis went hand in
hand with its imperial role, was not simply or even mainly a product of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, by which it was conditioned. Militarism had deeper roots in the need of the United States, as the hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy, to keep the doors open for foreign investment by resorting to force, if necessary. ... In this systematic historical approach to the subject of imperialism, as depicted above all by Magdoff, U.S. military interventions in places like Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic, were not about protecting U.S. citizens or fighting the expansion of the Communist bloc. Rather they belonged to the larger phenomenon of imperialism in all of its historical complexity and to the U.S. role as the hegemonic power of the capitalist world. {...} Over the course of the next decade the dominant topic of discussion in U.S. foreign policy , as witnessed, for example, by the Council on Foreign Relations publication, Foreign Affairs, was how to exploit the fact that the United States was now the sole superpower. Discussions of unipolarity (a term introduced by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer in 1991) and unilateralism were soon coupled with open discussions on U.S. primacy, hegemony, empire, and even imperialism. Moreover, as the decade wore on, the arguments in favor of the United States
exercising an imperial role became more and more pervasive and concrete. Such issues were discussed from the beginning of the new era not in terms of ends but in terms of efficacy. A particularly noteworthy example of the call for a new imperialism could be found in an influential book, entitled The Imperial Temptation, again by Robert W. Tucker, along with David C. Hendrickson, published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1992. As Tucker and Hendrickson forthrightly explained, The United States is today the
dominant military power in the world. {...} Under these circumstances, an age-old temptationthe imperial temptation may prove compelling for the United States....The nation is not likely to be attracted to the visions of empire that animated colonial powers of the past; it may well find attractive, however, a vision that enables the nation to assume an imperial role without fulfilling the classic duties of imperial rule (pp. 1415). {...}: The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy...to impose its will on the United States, our allies, or our friends....Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States. {...} In
other words, for a stagnating U.S. economy that, despite its relative economic gains in the late 1990s, is in a much weaker economic position vis--vis its main competitors than in the years following the Second World War, outright hegemonism is beyond its means, and it remains dependent on coalitions of the willing. At the same time, it is clear that in the present period of global
hegemonic imperialism the United States is geared above all to expanding its imperial power to whatever extent possible and subordinating the rest of the capitalist world to its interests.
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Hege = Imperialism
Hegemony is the backbone of the US imperialist project Robinson in 5 (Eric, Prof. of classical studies at Indiana University, Classical World, American Empire?
Ancient Reflections on Modern American Power, 99(1), p. 35-36)pl
The American Empire, or, more properly, whether America has an empire, is a fiercely debated topic these days. You see the issue arise in newspaper editorials, magazine articles, television discussions, and prominent new books. Historians in particular have taken up the question. The short term cause, of course, is the controversial U.S. invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, which has dominated headlines ever since its beginning. But for years before this second U.S.-Iraq war, talk
about the United States as Empire had been on the rise, stemming from the fact that since the fall of the Soviet Union the United States has been seen as the worlds lone superpower. This phrase is a clich by now, but it points to an undeniable truth: no other nation on earth comes close to matching Americas combination of military power, military reach, alliances, advanced technology, and economic strength. And since the psychologically devastating attacks on the
country on September 11, 2001, American policy has changed regarding the use of its unrivalled powe
US hegemony is imperialist and contributes to the US empire. David and Grondin in 6 (Charles-Philippe and David, Raoul Dandurand Chair in Strategic and
Diplomatic Studies, prof. of political studies at University of Ottawa, Ashgate, Hegemony or Empire?, p.8-9)pl
Numerous Cold War historians, as well as International Relations (IR) scholars, that have now taken a more historical-materialist approach have suggested that considering the US as an empire through the use of the literature on globalization would provide some better historical and conceptual bases for both areas of thought, as well as providing some insight for the overall context of the present imperial discourse. Furthermore, combining an American empire with globalization could give us a more
historicized version of globalization, one that firmly brings power back into the equation , instead of taking
globalization as a neutral and/or natural phenomenon. It could also give a more adequate concept of the place of the US in the contemporary international system, and some basis for comparison with the past. This historical sociology argument this makes bringing the US as an empire back into the IR discourse even more relevant, even if it may still be rejected afterwards. In truth, when comparing the United States with other empires one must not forget the context of global capitalism, and especially of globalization. Another thing to be aware of is that in so doing, in comparing US imperialism with other imperialisms from the 19th century onwards, the role of the world order producer of the United States in the prevalent globalized neoliberal
hegemony must be accounted for. In many respects, there seems to be intricate relations to be deciphered from the nexus of
globalization, security and hegemony/empire that characterizes American power in our time. In effect, the identity politics of the US could diminish the added value of comparative historical analysis. As asserts Martin Coward ,"Often this has been in the unhelpful form of generalizations drawing upon models of imperialism that were designed to explain the colonialist expansion of capitalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And yet it is clear that such models are poorly suited to the analysis of American power in the early twenty-first century not least because America has always insisted, in its self identity, in that it is
an anti-imperial, anti-colonial power." Drawing on the recent literature on a 'new American imperialism/empire', it would consequently become possible to undertake a critique of the new-found US imperial hegemony by way of taking cues from Hardt and Negri's Empire as a deterritorialized and borderless entity. Entering the terrain of this
Empire could indeed prove to be a good intellectual strategy if one wishes to understand the complexities of the networks of command and power relations that play in the reordering of global politics that has generally been subsumed under the title of 'globalization'.
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Hege = Imperialism
Hegemony enables the US to achieve its imperial goals. Mooers in 6 (Colin, Chair of the Department of Politics and School of Public Administration at Ryerson
University, Oneworld, The New Imperialists, p. 5-6)pl
The current round of imperialism, therefore, has as its goal the export and entrenchment of capitalist social-property relations throughout the world; it is about the universalization of capitalism. And just as in earlier phases of capitalism, state military power has been central to the imposition of this new stage of primitive accumulation and enclosure. However, if state military power is still essential for the imposition of capitalism in some parts of the world, and if its spectacular display remains vital to U.S. global hegemony, there is an important sense in which the dynamics of imperialism have changed markedly. Unlike its earlier forms, imperialism today no longer relies on direct colonization. Nor does military rivalry between states over resources and territory exist on the scale that it did in the time
of Lenin and Bukharin. But if imperialism is no longer defined by formal empire and military competition, how have militarism and capitalist imperatives become so closely linked in the new imperialism? The simple answer is that in a world comprised of
limited territorial states and the global reach of capital, the use of overwhelming military might becomes the only way of policing capitalist interests. When terrorist violence beyond the state is thrown into the mix, the problem
becomes even more intractable. For these reasons, a more or less permanent state of warfare war without end has become definitive of twenty-first-century capitalism: Boundless domination of a global economy, and of the multiple states
that administer it, requires military action without end , in purpose or time.12 If a state of permanent war has become the new normal of our time, it is clear why the discourse of empire has become so vital to those who defend this new order of things: the domestication of war and imperial conquest has become an urgent ideological imperative.
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a State Department audience: What are we doing? Were selling a product. The product we are selling is democracy. Its the free-enterprise system, the American value system. Its a product very much in demand. Its a product that is very much needed.38 Powells assertive promotion of Brand America confirmed that the confluence of public relations and public diplomacy in the postcold war period was now an official platform for strategic communications. {...} We promote U.S. interests not only through our policies but also in our beliefs and values. Never have these intangibles been more important than right now.40 In speeches and other communications she reiterated this approach, arguing that public diplomacy must present a total communication effort by putting the U.S. in whole context with communication that includes rational and logical discourse but also evokes our deepest emotions. With Beerss invocation of the emotional and rational dimensions of cultural diplomacy, the hearts and minds rhetoric of cold war cultural politics had been burnished with the language of public relations.41 At the same time, Beers supported programs using newer technologies
and marketing techniques drawn from public relations fields. An Internet campaign to reach Muslims overseas supported the Shared Values initiative, while the State Department revamped its international Web site, seeking to mirror cultural and national concerns in selected regions and to support educational and informational outreach missions across the world. The International
Information Programs (IIP) office coordinated the circulation of information as older styles of communications and exchange programming were supplemented and restyled by more flexible forms of virtual diplomacy to speed up the delivery and collapse the distance of gathering and dissemination of information. {...} .44 Beers announced the growing department intent to bring public diplomacy into the cyber age, {...} 45 The goal was to virtualize the role of public diplomacy to communicate not with foreign governments but with the people themselves, reaching beyond the more rarefied spaces of embassy diplomacy to the imaginary sphere of the Muslim street.46 {...} The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inactionand the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemys attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively. The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression . Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the worlds most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.1 Combining such ominous policy statements with Americas vast power and especially the campaigns launched in recent years in distant Afghanistan and Iraqboth stunning initial military successes with as yet uncertain long-term political outcomesone understands how and why many observers have come to see Americas place in the world as increasingly imperial and have sought to compare the American Empire with previous empires.
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foreign policy undermines liberal domestic political culture and institutions. The external pressures generated by international political and security competition tend to concentrate power in the state, as the processes and mechanisms of creating military powerthose institutions that connect the state to its society and enable it to transform societal resources into military capabilitiesare also those that tend to promote strong, centralized states.40 Because of its geographic insularity and the absence of immediate military threats, the United States was able to avoid
these state-centralizing tendencies in its early political development, and a national political community developed around a set of liberal-democratic principles that necessarily conflicted with the functional, state-centralizing requirements of security and foreign policy institutions. Consequently, exemplarists acknowledge a paradox in which those security and power-creating
institutions necessary to project power and advance liberalism abroad are precisely those that threaten liberalism and the American Creed at home, undermining the attraction of the U.S. example. A second corollary is that
improving the quality of the U.S. domestic political and social order, in addition to the intrinsic value of reducing the gap [End Page 124] between the American Creed in principle and in practice, serves the strategic purpose of strengthening the attraction of the U.S. liberal example. Exemplarists have historically been more skeptical toward U.S. institutions, or at least more cognizant of the capacity for reform and improvement. Rather than spreading U.S. institutions abroad, exemplarists counsel the somewhat indirect foreign policy strategy of strengthening them at home. The United States has a strategic interest in preserving and improving
its own institutions, making its example more compelling. Exemplarism also contains a claim about the efficacy of democracy promotion and the limits to U.S. power. Exemplarists have been comparatively skeptical toward the U.S. capacity to produce liberal change in the world. Because democracy is fragile and difficult to propagate, the ability of the U.S. government to directly promote and consolidate democratic institutions is limited and constrained.
Promotion of democracy is imperialist. Monten 5 (Jonathan, Research Fellow, International Security ProgramThe Roots of The Bush Doctrine
Pg 140 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v029/29.4monten.html) JL
That what can informally be called the "Bush Doctrine"for our purposes [End Page 140] an operationalization of
neoconservatismdefines U.S. security interests in terms of the expansion of U.S.-style liberalism is not
unique, and its nationalist vision of the United States as a redeeming force in international politics provides an essential point of continuity with preceding generations of grand strategy. Where the Bush Doctrine and its underlying neoconservative
disposition diverge from tradition, however, is in the particular vehemence with which it adheres to a vindicationist framework for democracy promotion, in which the aggressive use of U.S. power is employed as the primary instrument of liberal change. The United States' nationalist obligation to the world is discharged, and its security and political interests defended, through the policy mechanism of mission, and not example.
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States repeatedly sought to portray itself as a source of stability in the country and threatened that a withdrawal of U.S. forces would lead to greater sectarian violence.68 The other competitors in this marketplace of
ideas also drew on fear-based messages to persuade the Iraqi public however. Critics of the U.S. occupation maintained that the presence of U.S. troops actually fueled interethnic violence and attracted international terrorists to Iraq.69 Those arguing that
the withdrawal of U.S. troops would improve the security situation may have been more persuasive.
According to opinion polls conducted in 2006, 56% of Shiites and 81% ofSunnis Arabs said that violence would decrease following a U.S. troop pullout.70 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the U.S. efforts to use soft power to win hearts and
minds in Iraq also failed because support for the U.S.-led occupation clashed with the core material interests of the Iraqi population. Simply put, the U.S. occupation was in direct conflict with Iraqs core material interest of
regaining control of its lost sovereignty.
Kuwait invasion proves, military withdrawal leads to soft power Taheri in 3, (Amir, December 8, 2003, The Perils of Soft Power, New York Post, http://
www.nypost.com/theperilsofsoftpower/taheri) WDK
Another example: For 12 years ,Turkey used soft power to persuade Syria to close the bases of Kurdish terrorists on its soil. The
Syrians simply mocked the Turks. Then one day in 1999 a Turkish army appeared on the Syrian border with the mission to go and close those bases. The Syrian rulers instantly backed down, closed the bases and expelled the Kurdish Marxist rebel leaders. The anti-war crowd forget that soft power was used on both Saddam Hussein and Afghanistan's Taliban. In 1990 when Saddam invaded and annexed Kuwait, he was offered a range of soft power goodies in exchange for withdrawal. One formula worked out by French President
Francois Mitterrand and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev was to extend the Iraqi coastline on the Persian Gulf by 25 kilometers at the expense of Kuwait. Saddam was also to receive the Kuwaiti islands of Warbah and Bubiyan plus the entire Kuwaiti part of the Rumailah oilfields.
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terms of loss of assets, loss of jobs, and loss of economic security, to say nothing of the loss of dignity and hope. And by the same logic that has it that the most vulnerable territories get hit first, so it is typically the most vulnerable populations within those territories that bear the brunt of any burden. It was the rural poor of
Mexico, Thailand, and Brazil who suffered most from the depredations that flowed from the financial crises of the 1980s and 1990s. The very idea that those who irresponsibly lend might also be held responsible is, of course, dismissed out of hand by ruling elites. That would require calling the wealthy property-owning classes everywhere to account and insisting that they look to their responsibilities rather than to their inalienable rights to private property and a satisfactory rate of profit. But, as Joseph Chamberlain found, it is far
easier politically to pillage and debase far-away populations (particularly those who are racially, ethnically, or culturally different), than to confront overwhelming capitalist class power at home. The sinister and destructive side of spatial-temporal fixes to the overaccumulation problem becomes just as crucial an element within the historical geography of capitalism as does its creative counterpart in building a new landscape to accommodate both the endless accumulation of capital and the endless accumulation of political power.
Cultural Imperialism becomes a tool of the government to expand its own power, at the sake of serious global damage Harvey in 3, (David, The New Imperialism, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, PHD, 2003l http://web.
me.com/eatonak/PE/page10/files/New%20Imperialism.pdf)
Critical engagement over the years with Marx's account of primitive accumulationwhich in any case had the quality of a sketch rather than a systematic explorationsuggests some lacunae that need to be remedied. The process of proletarianization, for example, entails a mix of coercions and of appropriations of precapitalist skills, social relations, knowledges, habits of mind, and beliefs on the part of those being proletarianized. Kinship structures, familial and household arrangements, gender and authority relations (including those exercised through religion and its institutions) all have their part to play. In some instances the pre-existing structures have to be violently repressed as inconsistent with labour under capitalism, but multiple accounts now exist to suggest that
they are just as likely to be co-opted in an attempt to forge some consensual as opposed to coercive basis for working-class formation. Primitive accumulation, in short, entails appropriation and co-optation of preexisting cultural and social achievements as well as confrontation and supersession. The conditions of struggle
and of working-class formation vary widely and there is, therefore, as Thompson among others has insisted, a sense in which a working class 'makes itself though never, of course, under conditions of its own choosing.7 The result is often to leave a trace of pre-
capitalist socialrelations in working-class formation and to create distinctive geographical, historical, and anthropological differentiations in how a working class is denned. No matter how universal the process of proletarianization, the result is not the creation of a homogeneous proletariat.8
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more contemporary global feel as it has begun to share in the contemporary topos of the trans(-): the evocation of the
transnational, transcultural, and (a necessary part of this, though less commonly added) the transgenic. One sign is that environmental crisis has become hyperaware of global interactions occurring painfully and even riskily in real time. These days, lungs in the U.S. contract as fearfully at information about the deforestation of the Amazon as they do at disputes over national clean air standards. In 1932, Aldo Leopold complained that "when I go birding in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field and re-electing an imperialist to get me rubber"; he meant this, Lawrence Buell notes, as "a reductio ad aburdam of purist thinking" (2001, 302). Contemporary globalization, in the meantime, has institutionalized such discourse as a part of our normality, not something ridiculous. 7 It is now a staple of social justice rhetoric and global activism, as when Noam Chomsky points out that American children use baseball bats hand-dipped in toxic chemicals by Haitian women and corporations are scrutinized for their overseas labor practices. It is equally a staple of environmental crisis thought, expressed in several ways. For example, environmental imperialism by a resource-hogging, pollution-
generating North is now a commonplace perception ("a baby born in the United States creates thirteen times as much environmental damage over the course of its lifetime as a baby born in Brazil, and thirty-five times as much as an Indian baby") (Hertsgaard 196); the huge environmental footprints of consumer items purchased by innocent consumers extend well across the world, as environmentalists chart these effects; and linkages between
apparently innocent first world choices are exposed as having drastic effects-at-a-distance [End Page 63] (as when Theordore Roszak unhappily discovers that "the material from which my eyeglass frames are made comes from an endangered species, the hawksbill turtle" and is told that whenever he turns on a light bulb powered by nuclear energy, he is "adding to the number of anecephalic babies in the world" (Rozak 36).
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military superpower, with all meanseven the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military onesat its disposal." The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administrations
refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled "Apocalypse Soon" in the MayJune 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: "The United States has never endorsed the policy of no first use, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weaponsby the decision of one person, the presidentagainst either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so." The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the
willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fitsetting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide
emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the worlds total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the worlds growing environmental problemsraising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority
over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by
Venezuelas Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chvez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to enter the "nuclear club." Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is
US military power prevents efforts to slow climate change Dalby 8 (Simon, PhD Dept of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton Univ, IMPERIALISM,
DOMINATION, CULTURE: THE RELEVANCE OF CRITICAL GEOPOLITICSPg 11, April 30 http://montreal2008.ipsa.org/site/images/PAPERS/section3/RC%2015%20-%20Dalby%20-%203.1.pdf) JL
Thus to follow David Harveys rendition of the question Iraq is symptomatic of a much larger imperial ambition, one that he poses as whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil
spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future. 46 But more so than this it is important to note that the
military operations in the Middle East are also tied into a particular part of the American political economy, what Nitzan and Bichler call the weapon-dollar petro-dollar complex; arms companies and logistics firms that provide both military and oil field services and security. 47 But, and here the argument once again supports Agnew's case that these recent attempts to assert military control are against the long term thrust of American practice, it is fairly easy to say that this is fraction of capital that has had its day, new innovations in high tech, biotech and renewable energy systems are nonetheless delayed and thwarted by this backward looking policy of trying to maintain control over petroleum in the Middle East. In Bichler and Nitzan's terms, war in the Middle East facilitates differential accumulation in this sector of the economy. Thus the struggles within the United States about climate
change and the adoption of new energy strategies, are also an important part of the larger matter of resisting imperial domination in its more overt military forms in South West Asia.
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predicated on and realized through uneven spatial developmentits natural state is characterized by an intensely variegated and persistently unstable topography .8 Convergence on a unified and monolithic neoliberal end
state should not be anticipated, let alone held up as some kind of litmus test for determining the extent of neoliberal transformation. Likewise, the long-run sustainability of any given neoliberal policy project (such as trade liberalization or welfare reform) is not required for there to be a neoliberalization of policy regimes; neoliberalization operates
through trial-and-error experimentation, more often than not under conditions of crisis, leading in turn to deep regulatory failures and highly dysfunctional, disruptive consequences. Congruence and coherence across policy domains, therefore, are not prerequisites for an active program of neoliberalization to be under way. Rather, the critical signifiers of deep neoliberalization include: the growing ecological dominance of neoliberal structures, discourses, routines, and impulses within state formations; the intensification of regulatory re-structuring [End Page 52]
efforts and crisis-driven responses within neoliberal parameters; and the mutual interpenetration, heightened congruence, and increased complementarity of neoliberal reforms.
Preserving imperialistic military power empirically results in the degradation of nature. Shrair in 10 (Jamal, MSc in High Energy Physics & PhD in Surface Physics and Electron Devices at the
Budapest University of Technology and Economics ,Environmental Crisis and Self-Destructive Imperialism 1/22 http://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/environmental-crisis-and-selfdestructive-imperialism/) JL
The present environmental crisis was triggered by the industrial revolution. As the industrial age started to progress
the problem became visible, but it was simply ignored. From the beginning of the industrial revolution until the last two decades of the 20th century, we paid no attention to the pollution of our common home. The only important things were maximum profit
and minimum loss, industrial expansion, especially that of the military industries which served the aims of colonialism, irrational ideological struggle, hegemony, power politics, etc. The lack of a rational economic order is certainly the primary cause of the problem: The resources of the planet are unwisely exploited, the motivation being to make as much profit as possible within the shortest possible time, while waste is being dumped wherever it is the cheapest to do so, such as in the oceans. There is no doubt that with a small fraction of what we have
already wasted from the resources of the planet, the entire present world population could have prospered and enjoyed a very high standard of living if only we possessed and practised a higher level of social consciousness than we have done in the past one hundred years. As an example, the total military expenditure in the USA and former USSR in the 1980s alone (!) reached one trillion USD.
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economy as expressed in the neoliberal order that have made the success of the more radical redistributional proposals of the WCED unlikely.105 Similarly, Paterson, in one of the first comprehensive accounts of global climate politics, notes that the effect of neoliberalism has been to narrow available options and to weaken the capabilities of states to respond effectively to issues of responsibility and North-South distributive justice notably implicated in global climate change. It is instructive, for example, that despite the unambiguous mention of CDR in
the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol, significant portions of these documents nevertheless read as though they are an [End Page 44] appendix to a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement. One such paragraph is Article 3 (5) of the UNFCCC where Parties affirms the need to promote an open international economic system that would lead to sustainable economic growth, insisting that measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of . . . restriction on international trade.106 In general, it is safe to assert that the relative success of CDR in global environmental governance is for the most part due to its resilience and particularly because it generates less specific, and somewhat more localized obligations than CHM. Crucially,
whatever the duties and responsibilities that are generated by CDR, the unspoken ultimate imperative is that such obligations must not amount to a fundamental challenge to the prevailing rules of international commerce and global economic power structures. Accordingly much of the early hope that CDR would lead to globally responsible environmental policies has been abandoned for minimalist and voluntaristic (often free market based) gestures which benefit a very limited number of developing countries (mostly China and India). The new order
is reflected in the Montreal Protocol where China and India are the main beneficiaries of an essentially localized Ozone Fund. This effect is also manifest in the Climate Change Convention where, in the words of Paterson, the advantages of market mechanisms over command and control regulation *are+ often regurgitated, rather in the form of a mantra.107 Bodansky108 echoes this sentiment, aptly observing that whilst a commitment for OECD transfer exists, neither the UNFCCC nor the Kyoto Protocol actually requires any particular country to contribute any particular amount. Even the much acclaimed equity policy in the UNFCCthe Clean Development Mechanismhas apparently only succeeded because it is (rightly or wrongly) perceived as an
innovative construct which allows justice to be dispensed by the market and without violating the sacred canons of the neoliberal order.
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transferred its crucial technology to Japan on concessionary terms and opened its markets to Japanese goods while tolerating Japans protection of its domestic market. This led to the hollowing out of key American Industries such as steel, consumer electronics, robotics, automotive, camera, and semi-conductor industries. This suicidal economic policy was also continued as a trade off to maintain US military bases in Japan. The long-term impact was that soon the American industries became uncompetitive vis--vis Japanese industries. With the
huge US export market made available to them, Japan, becoming a five trillion-dollar economy, pursued an aggressive export led growth. It followed its own brand of state guided capitalism steering clear of market capitalism and the command economy of the Soviets. Increasingly, it expanded its production capacity. What was hidden from economic planners was that
Japan generated industrial over capacity that threatened the health of the economy. The over capacity reached
crisis point when other Asian countries such as South Korea, Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, emulated the fast catch up strategy of Japan. There were too many factories, writes Johnson, turning out athletic shoes, automobiles, television sets, semiconductors, petrochemicals, steel and ships for too few buyers. The ripple effect of the over capacity is the increased competition between American and European MNC. This has resulted in corporations cutting costs by transferring the high paid jobs from the advanced economy to low wage developing countries. The global demand is on the verge of collapse, as rich countries
do not generate demand on account of market saturation or stagnant or falling income of its people. In
countries like China, Vietnam and Indonesia the workers who earn low wages cannot buy the goods produced by them. In East Asian economies financial capitalism spearheaded by the US played an important role in destabilising the economies. US
played an aggressive role in making the East Asian economies to deregulate the capital market. The Wall Street
Treasury Complex thrust the concept of capital mobility upon the East Asian countries. The nature of money pumped into the economy of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines was hot money. The financial inflows were short term, speculative, highly liquid and could easily leave the economy. The US accumulated vast funds (around 3 trillion dollars) especially in the mutual funds. These pools of capital were invested and transferred out of the Asian economies. The result was catastrophic:
East Asian economies collapsed. Big American companies bought factories and businesses for a song. Proctor
& Gamble picked up several South Korean state of art Companies at a fraction of the price. In Thailand, American Investment firms bought service, steel, and energy companies at throw away prices. The Carlyle Group sent Bush senior to Bangkok to evaluate opportunities to buy real estate at low prices. The economic meltdown resulted in the largest transfer of wealth in
the history of the world. The smoldering anger of East Asians against US predatory capitalism is a potential source of retaliatory strikes against US interests in the region.
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That is why the shift toward a more apartheid-like form of indirect rule was made in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising. In India and elsewhere there was a hardening of racial attitudes toward all sectors of the local population but especially a revulsion occurred against educated and Westernized members of indigenous societies who threatened to overturn the difference sustaining British superiority.72 Thereafter, physical distancing and the invention of imperial traditions like the Indian durbar which drew in equal measure from imagined English and Indian feudal ceremonies and customs, became the order of the day. As Lytton cynically observed in
1877, the further east you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.73
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rule. But note: this is an utterly ad hoc addition to his theory. In no respect can it be said to flow from any of his reflections on human rights per se. Moreover, others proceeding from the same principle of limiting cruelty and suffering have arrived at entirely opposite conclusions with respect to imperial war. Ignatieff s myriad proclamations for human rights thus lack any demonstrable tie to his support of empire and imperial war. This is convenient, of course, since the chasm between moralizing rhetoric and imperial advocacy allows Ignatieff to pump out empty platitudes as if these contained real ethical guidance. Concrete moral choices, involving historical study and calibrations of real human risk, never enter the equation. So, Ignatieff can drone on about the world being a better place without Saddam, never so much as acknowledging the cost of this result: some 25,000 Iraqis killed as a result of armed conflict since the start of the U.S. invasion, and probably more than 100,000 dead as a result of all the consequences of the U.S. war.24 Nowhere does he offer any kind of calculus for determining if these tens of thousands of deaths are ethically justified. Instead, banalities about being rid of Saddam are offered up without even countenancing the
scale of human suffering that Ignatieff s preferred course of action war and occupation has entailed. But then, Ignatieff shows little regard for ordinary people in the zones of military conflict. His concern is for the security of the West and of the U.S.A. in particular. Ruminating about Americas new vulnerability in the world, for instance, he writes, When American naval planners looked south from the Suez Canal, they had only bad options. All the potential refuelling stops Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Yemen are dangerous places for American warships. As the attack on the U.S.S. Cole made clear, none of the governments in these strategically vital refuelling stops can actually guarantee the safety of their imperial visitors.25
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Empire = Racism/Sexism/Violence
Current attempt to secure economic growth/democratic principles globally is a form of militarized globalization. It leads to the direct ratcheting up of racism, sexism, and violence on other countries. MOHANTY in 6 (CHANDRA TALPADE, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006, US Empire and the Project of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship, complicity and dissent, http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
A number of scholars including Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2004) conclude that since the last decades of the twentieth century, the US rules through the mechanisms of informal empire managing the flow of corporate capital globally across and through the borders of nation/states, as well as through military interventions in countries that resist this form of capitalist globalization.2 However, I would argue that these mechanisms of informal and not violently visible empire building are predicated on deeply gendered, sexualized, and racial ideologies that justify and consolidate the hypernationalism, hypermasculinity, and neo-liberal discourses of capitalist democracy bringing freedom to oppressed third world peoples especially to third world women. The US war state mobilizes gender and race hierarchies and nationalist xenophobia in its declaration of internal and external enemies, in its construction and consolidation of the homeland security regime, and in its use of the checkbook and cruise missile to protect its own economic and territorial interests. It mobilizes both languages of empire and imperialism to consolidate a militarized regime internally as well as outside its territorial borders. Bringing democracy and freedom (or more precisely the free market) to Afghanistan and Iraq most recently, then, has involved economic devastation, de-masculinization, destruction of cultural, historical, natural and environmental resources, and, of course, indiscriminate massacres in both countries. Similarly, making the homeland safe has involved the militarization of daily life, increased surveillance and detention of immigrants, and a culture of authoritarianism fundamentally at odds with American liberal democratic ideals. If the larger, overarching project of the US capitalist state is the production of citizens for empire, then the citizens for democracy narrative no longer holds. Where US liberal democratic discourse posed questions about democracy, equality, and autonomy (the American dream realized), neo-liberal, militarist discourse poses questions about the free market, global opportunity, and the protection of US interests inside and outside its national borders. Capitalist imperialism is now militarist imperialism. Capitalist globalization is militarized globalization.
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Empire = Racism
US imperialism follows the logic of exclusion which justifies racism Flanagan et al 8 (John, Fellow at the University of Washington, Representing Permanent War Vol 8 No 2
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v008/8.2.feldman.html) JL The concept imperial formation, recently distilled by Ann Laura Stoler, captures the mobile terrain on which these battles for an antiracist historical legibility have been waged. Imperial formation suggests the shifting degrees of rights, scale, rule, and
violence through which the state projects sovereignty both within and outside internationally agreed upon borders. They are macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation. They thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it. Finally, imperial formations give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites ofand social groups withprivileged exemption (2006, 128). This theory of the shifting cartography of empire as one built on differential forms of exclusion and exemption that operate through racist social structures begins to help us see how SNCC and, increasingly, many others involved in the black freedom
movement began to see in Palestine facts . . . that pertain to our struggle here. A critique of the widespread discourse of U.S. support for Palestines occupation could challenge the staid exceptionalist arguments that the United States and Israel were somehow unique in achieving their philosophical commitments and political practices of freedom and democracy. Indeed, U.S.
exceptionalist discourse, as Stoler and David Bond cogently noteand the black freedom movements post-1967 engagement with Palestine gives depth, complexity, and specificity tohas historically constructed places exempt from scrutiny and peoples partially excluded from rights (2006, 95), what Etienne Balibar calls a fluctuating combination of continued exteriorization and internal exclusion
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Empire = Violence
US imperialism justifies violence in the name of progress. We solve for root cause of violence and enter a world of positive peace. McNally in 6 (David, Professor of political science at York Universit The new imperialists Ideologies
of Empire Ch 5 Pg 103) JL
This, then, is the end point of our thinking persons imperialism. Starting from flowery platitudes about ethics and human rights, it leaves us with banal defences of an empire that practises torture, uses lies and deception to justify war, tramples on human rights, and launches a new arms race. In the process, our imperial apologist fractures logic, evades evidence, claims moral superiority for his kind, and demonizes imperialized Others. And so we return to Joseph Conrad. For all the shortcomings of Heart of Darkness, Conrad intuited the metamorphosis of imperial identity that characterizes the likes of Michael Ignatieff. Key to Conrads depiction is that the imperialist begins by lying to himself he spurns reality in favour of his fetish. However much Ignatieff believes his own mutterings about ethics and human rights, his pronouncements must be measured against the murders and the torture carried out by those he nominates as humanitys benefactors and whose crimes he both evades and backhandedly defends. {..} U.S. imperialism today. Its agents too have the morality of burglars breaking into a safe. But their crimes, just like those of an earlier era of colonialists, are of an exponentially higher order. {...} . Defence of empire of murder, pillage, torture, and deception transforms the defenders themselves. Whatever values they might have once professed, the reality of what they defend takes possession of them, turns them into something other than what they intended. This is a central theme of Heart of Darkness, which, as I have noted, is a warning to the Western apologist for empire that he is an accomplice of madness and horror.
Imperialism necessitates violent military backing. Barkawi 4 (Tarak, lecturer in international security at the Centre of International Studies Globalization,
Culture, and War On the Popular Mediation of "Small Wars"Pg 120 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v058/58.1barkawi.html) JL
The association between liberalism in politics and economy and peace drew on core Enlightenment themes and their construction of war. For classical liberalism, wars were essentially atavistic, "the relics of a dying age that had not yet
been illuminated by the dawn of the Enlightenment" (Joas 2003, 30). As "reform" and "progress" overcame despots and the warrior castes of the aristocracy, and free trade fuelled prosperity, wars civil and foreign would pass into history. Easily obscured from
view in this vision of a pacific liberal modernity is the role of force in making liberal the illiberal as well as specifically liberal tendencies to war, that is, those tendencies to war generated in a world being made liberal and modern in diverse and important ways. In particular, European imperial expansion, which involved widespread use of force, was fundamental to the creation of the modern international economy. Imperialism set in train modernization [End Page 120] processes that generated, and continue to generate, social and political tensions that often take violent form. Creating and maintaining a free-trading world required, and continues to require, repeated and sustained use of force. These forceful processes provided the essential social, political, and cultural contexts of modern globalizations, and their consequences were quite different from the
expectations of classical liberalism.
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Empire = Genocide/Famine
Imperialism encourages economic underdevelopment in colonized countries which leads to famine and imperial genocide, India model proves Mooers 6, (Collin, THE NEW IMPERIALISTS: IDEOLOGIES OF EMPIRE, Chapter 6, Chair of the Department of Politics and School of Public
Adminstration at Ryerson University, Toronto) WDK But it was not for lack of ideological commitment that India failed to overcome its essentially pre-capitalist dynamic in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonial officials both at home and in the colonies saw their civilizing mission as
imparting the benefits of economic improvement and Christian piety. The gentlemanly capitalism57 that dominated in the colonial administration sought to link the socialproperty relations which lay at the heart of Englands seventeenth- and eighteenth-century agrarian capitalist revolution with the newer forms of financial and service
capital that came to prominence in the later nineteenth century. These officials had read their Locke on property, enclosure, and improvement. They were also avid proponents of the latest principles of political economy espoused by Malthus, Bentham, and Mill. It was the liberal empire so vaunted by Ferguson which encouraged not just chronic economic
underdevelopment, but which bears responsibility for the deaths of millions due to starvation during the two great waves of famine which swept India in 187679 and 18961900. Between 5.5 and 12 million died in the famine of 187679 and mortality rates were highest in areas best served by railways. As Mike Davis has shown in painful detail, it was the fanatical commitment to free-market and Malthusian dogmas which made famine a death sentence for millions while British officials railed against enthusiastic prodigality as they shipped huge grain exports out of the country. Malthuss injunctions against feeding the poor and hungry because mother nature had not set enough places at her table were taken up by British viceroys from Lytton to Curzon with
methodical and murderous abandon. Just as in England, poor relief in times of poor harvest was considered a slippery slope leading to more permanent forms of relief. In India, Lytton reasoned, The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief . . . would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to demand relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid for a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.58 Ferguson devotes a scant few lines to the disastrous policies pursued by British officials during the famine years, admitting that free-market policies may have made
things worse than they might have been, but dismissing criticism that the British did nothing to avert starvation.
He rejects the view that their actions can be likened to other modern genocides on the grounds that Lytton never planned to kill millions of Indians whereas the Nazi genocide was intentional.63 However, it is difficult to imagine a more intentional
outcome than that pursued by Lytton and Temple: they knew that other measures were available and that mass starvation could be averted (as Temple had done previously in Bengal and Bihar) and yet they proceeded to do the opposite. Indeed, even byMalthusian standards, it was hardly a situation of letting nature run its course. The reduction of rations,
insistence on hard labour, and collection of the land tax could have no other outcome than drastically increasing mortality rates. Instead of viewing such actions for what they were intentional acts of imperial genocide the most that Ferguson can muster is the rhetorical query: But would Indians have been better off under the Mughals? Or for that matter, under the Dutch or the Russians?64 In fact, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the Moguls and Marathas did attempt to tailor their rule to fluctuating ecological and climactic conditions, especially in drought-prone regions. Moreover, as Davis asserts, There is
persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal and informal imperialism.65
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patience to use the United Nations to put forward its own values, but rather pursued what might be referred to as peace under imperial domination (diguo tongzhi xia de heping). America's invasion of Iraq has damaged the authority of the United Nations and the principle of the inviolability of national sovereignty. Before the war
broke out, Bush repeatedly sent out warnings in which he stated that if the Security Council refused to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force, the United Nations would become irrelevant. Some hawks in the administration and conservative newspapers even threatened that the United States could withdraw from the United Nations, bringing it to an ignominious end. The strategy of
preemption as espoused by American neoconservatism, along with new interpretations of sovereignty, will bring about a revolution in the twenty-first century, and the war in Iraq will serve as a model. The United States will use its neo-imperialist imagination in an attempt to recreate the so-called rogue states and restore world order. The strategy of preemption is a sign of America's abandonment of both traditional Western international regulatory systems and the principle of rule by law as established under the U.N. charter. Instead, America is bringing about the return to an era where naked power takes preeminence. At a press conference held June 27, 2003, after talks with
the French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, Nelson Mandela commented on this shift: "Since the establishment of the U.N., there have been no world wars; therefore, anybody, and particularly the leaders of the superpowers, who takes unilateral action outside the frame of the U.N. must receive the condemnation of all who love peace." On a visit to Ireland on June 20, 2003, he went on to say, "Any organization, any country, any movement that now decides to sideline the United Nations, that
country and its leader are a danger to the world. We cannot allow the world to again degenerate into a place where the will of the powerful dominates over all other considerations. "4 [End Page 160] The strategy of preemption is not simply a military strategy, but is, in fact, a kind of barbaric politics, a serious attack against civilized humanity. It is ultimately tied to the question of whether the world is seeking civilization and order, or whether it is entering into a period of violence and chaos. The United States' adoption of this strategy provoked the intense opposition of Europe and, indeed, the entire world because many believe that a strategy of preemption would take the
world in the latter direction. As a result of the Iraq War, a deep rift was opened up between America and its western European allies, to which the media now frequently affix the label "Old Europe." Modern history, beginning in 1492, has been a Eurocentric history of colonialism, imperialism, and expansion. However, the United States has replaced Europe as imperialist colonizer. The
imagination of American neoconservative politics has inspired the United States to become a tyrannical and self-appointed hegemon, willfully changing global boundaries, and a particularly intense force for the destruction of world order. Europe, on the other hand, has become a force for rationality and civilization. The dispute that arose between Europe and America during the Iraq War was both a conflict of potential profit and a sign of civilizational disparity.
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non- or even anti-imperialist power. It has been able to conceal its imperial ambition in an abstract universalism . . . to deny the significance of territory and geography altogether in the articulation of imperial power.6 But policing U.S. interests has had its own costs and perils. The dogma of economic openness7 was dependent on either the cooperation of compliant local regimes or, failing that, an increasing number of small wars which, as one recent champion of such conflicts admits, might as well be called imperial wars.8 In the twentieth century alone, it is estimated that the United States sent troops or sponsored local forces to fight in sixty such small wars. The hazard of small wars of empire is that they can turn into major ones, resulting in the perennial danger of imperial overreach as happened most spectacularly for the U.S. in Vietnam. American defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese famously established the conditions for the Vietnam syndrome the belief that the U.S.A. could not and should not fight wars it could not guarantee it would win. And winning in military terms meant the deployment of overwhelming force, preferably against much weaker enemies as in the Grenada or Panama invasions. The same guiding principle was in force in the 1991 Gulf War. It
may have been premature for George Bush Sr. to declare an end to the Vietnam syndrome after that conflict since the very small number of allied deaths had not yet sufficiently tested the American publics willingness to accept a larger number of casualties. The Vietnam syndrome proved alive and well in the aftermath of the Somalian debacle of 1993 where 1,200 U.S. troops were routed by local warlords and forced to withdraw. The Clinton Doctrine, which dominated military policy for the rest of the 1990s, sought to avoid U.S. casualties at all costs. Economic openness, now enshrined under the equally euphemistic ideology of globalization, would be secured by means of a modern equivalent of old-fashioned gunboats in cruise missiles and aircraft armed with precisionguided munitions.9
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American efforts at informal rule have been largely inept: initial military success based on a strategy of limited war, usually followed by an escalation of military force due to a flawed reading of indigenous support, has inevitably led to domestic disillusionment and ultimate withdrawal.34 Far more successful have been direct annexations or periods of prolonged occupation as occurred in Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War Two.35 The United
States has failed in its imperial ambitions when it has attempted to fight limited wars of occupation and when public support as in Vietnam begins to wane and a sufficiently strong-willed leadership is lacking.36 The loss of Iran in 1979 to theocratic fundamentalism was a calamity whose ramifications were and remain incalculable.37 The Khomeini regime legitimated terrorism for the next generation of Islamo-bolshevism38 the term Ferguson prefers to describe bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is
the offspring of the Middle Easts distinctive civilization of clashes, a retarded political culture in which terrorism has long been a substitute for both peaceful politics and conventional warfare.39 The Bush administration was therefore correct in claiming there was a connection between the sponsorship of terrorism and the policies of countries such as Afghanistan, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Iraq. They were right to claim that weapons of mass destruction were being produced by Saddam Hussein; right to claim that further U.N. inspections would be ineffective in finding them and, therefore, right in invading Iraq: the only mystery is why Iraq was not invaded before 2003.40
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Empire = Militarism
Imperialism encourages the use of military force to secure industries and profits McDonald et al 7 (Patrick, professor in the department of government at UT, The Achilles' Heel of
Liberal IR Theory? Globalization and Conflict in the PreWorld War I Era http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v059/59.3mcdonald.html) JL
The economic incentives for conflict do not stem solely from the latter's ability to restrict trade and drive up domestic prices. Classic writings about imperialism suggest another mechanism that focuses on the use of military force to defend existing external markets or secure new outlets for domestic production.30 Because protected sectors rely on the state to enact barriers to make their products more competitive in the domestic market, their opportunities for capturing new global markets [End Page 380] are relatively restricted. If they already rely on tariffs
to survive in the domestic economy, they will be unable to survive in more competitive international markets without this assistance.
To capture larger profits, they may be willing to pay some of the costs of the larger defense burdens necessary to open new markets with military forceincluding higher taxes. The conquest of another economy offers economic rewards by enlarging the size of the protected domestic market. Alternatively, military force can be deployed to prevent foreign firms from penetrating third-party markets. Protected firms that have the potential to accrue economic gains from the use of military force can be contrasted with more competitive firms that do not need regulatory assistance to remain profitable. The goods of the latter group penetrate new markets because they
are produced more efficiently and at lower costs. Consequently, firms that do not rely on protection to remain profitable lack any economic incentive to pay the costs associated with war.
US imperialism leads to militarism. Johnson 7 (Chalmers, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire: Is America in Decline? May 6 http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/chalmersjohnsons-blowback-the-costs-and/page-4/) JL
Tom Plate, a columnist for the Los Angles Times, once described United States as "a muscle bound crackpot with little more than cruise missiles for brains. US media glorify the warrior roles and justify the use of military force in world affairs. The reported statement of Madeleine Albright best exemplifies this: If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are an indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future. Echoing his concern Johnson observes, In the decade
following the end of the cold war, the US largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation. In pursuit of its imperial dreams US maintains its elaborate military bases all over the world. Its military expenditure dwarfs imagination. Conservative estimate places the US military expenditure in the region of four hundred billion dollars a year. According to Brookings Institution study, it
costs US $5.5 trillion to build and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon Industrial Complex sets its own agenda and it has a voracious appetite for more and more resources. The military system has become an autonomous system. With corporate interests permeating the military, the civilian control over the military is at best tenuous. Policymaking is dominated by militarism, a
vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purpose which is the defense of its realm.
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profound environmental impacts associated with militarism as the treadmill of destruction. Treadmill of destruction theory is, in part, inspired by the treadmill of production perspective, which argues that an economic system predicated on constant growth generates ever increasing environmental degradation .12 However, Hooks and Smith13 note that the military is not simply a derivative of the economic system but has its own expansionary dynamics with unique environmental impacts. Drawing from various perspectives within political sociology,14 Hooks and
Smith15 argue that, primarily for geopolitical reasons, statesnot classes or firmsdeclare and wage wars. At the same time, military developmentinfluenced by geopolitics and domestic pressuresgenerates various forms of environmental
degradation. Thus, the fundamental logic of the treadmill of destruction undermines environmental protection concerns. This was clearly articulated by a US military base commander during a community hearing in Virginia: We are in the business of protecting the nation, not the environment. 16 Warfare causes significant environmental harms, including the chemical contamination of ecosystems and devastation of landscapes that result directly from military weaponry. Moreover, military campaigns consume enormous amounts of fossil and nuclear fuels in planes, ships, and tanks.17 Michael T. Klare18 notes that the US military consumes at least 1.3 billion gallons of oil annually in the Middle East alonemore than the annual consumption of Bangladesh.19 Such levels of fossil fuel use are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. 20 Treadmill of destruction theory contends that the expansionary dynamics of militarism are not limited to periods of war. Vested geopolitical and military [End Page 9] interests as well as constant preparation for future conflicts
escalate the scale and operations of militaries. As a result, even in the absence of armed conflict military institutions and their
activities consume vast amounts of nonrenewable energy and other resources for research and development, maintenance, and operation of the overall infrastructure.21 At the same time, they generate large amounts of toxic substances and waste, which contribute to the contamination of land and water. While some contamination
occurs through the testing of weapons,22 militaries also use a broad range of thinners, solvents, lubricants, degreasers, fuels, pesticides, and propellants as part of the everyday operation and maintenance of military equipment. As a result, militaries
produce the greatest amount of hazardous waste in the world. 23 Further, the most ecologically devastated locations on Earth are found wherever military production facilities operate, given that they are often exempt from environmental protection legislation in the name of national security. 24 According to the United Nations Centre for Disarmament,25 armed forces have used a steadily increasing amount of land for bases, other installations, and training exercises over the last century. Even the end of the Cold War has not reduced the use of public lands for military operations, training, testing, and exercises.26 The United States alone has hundreds of military bases in almost sixty countries.27 A network of military bases encompasses the globe, requiring a vast amount of resources especially fossil fuelsto staff, operate, and transport equipment and personnel between destinations. Collins28 notes that even
with advanced technologies, military operations require bases close to theaters of action to supply energy and personnel needs. To a significant extent military power remains dependent upon access to land. In order to support operations and personnel, militaries must have ready supplies of raw materials and energy as well as the infrastructure to meet specific needs. Consequently, militaryoriented resource use involves strategic stockpiling of fuels and other materials, with resource consumption further increased by industries that produce marginal equipment for the armed forces and their support economies. The production of such marginal equipment and stockpiling of fuels places greater demands upon the environment. The populations of armed forces also use large quantities of materials for uniforms and specialized forms of clothing that would not otherwise be consumed. Further, the labor intensity of militaries increases the resources required for training, armaments, transportation, and the housing of troops and support personnel. [End Page 10] The peacetime activities of the military generate different forms of waste. During
regular operations, the armed forces consume large amounts of fossil fuels. 29 Renner30 estimates that the petroleum products used for land vehicles, aircrafts, sea vessels, and other military machinery account for approximately 75 percent of all energy use by the armed forces worldwide. Further, the US Pentagon operates the
worlds largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems, which is almost entirely fueled by oil.31 As a result, the Department of Defense is the worlds leading consumer of petroleum. 32
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there is little question about the degree to which the horrible costs and consequences of American Empire have become largely routinized within both elite and popular consciousness; the very idea of U.S. culpability for terrible atrocities, including war crimes, human rights violations, and
crimes against humanity, is generally regarded as too far off the normal spectrum of discourse to be taken seriously. Given the postwar historical record,
we are dealing here with nothing less than large-scale insensitivity to mass murder. The United States has become such a dominant world superpower that its crimes are more or less invisible, that is, they appear as an integral, acceptable, indeed predictable element of imperial power. Rarely a loser in war, the United States has never had to confront the grievances of those who have been wronged. This
condition is exacerbated by the phenomenon of technowar, which, since World War II, has increasingly removed any sense of immediate personal involvement in warfare, meaning that feelings
of guilt, shame, and moral outrage that might be expected to accompany killing, and especially acts of mass murder, are more easily sidestepped, repressed, forgotten-more easily yet where such acts are carried out by proxies. Long experience tells us that ordinary people, once having completed military training, . can all too often calmly plan and implement the killing of vast numbers of unknown, face-less, innocent, defenseless human beings, whether by firing missiles, dropping bombs from thirty thousand feet, shooting off longdistance artillery shells, or engaging in traditional ground combat (increasingly rare for the U.S. military). Once the enemy is portrayed as a sinister beast and monster, dehumanized as a worthless other, then the assault becomes a matter of organization, technique, and planning, part of the day-to-day routi~e~ of s.imply obeying commands, carrying out assigned tasks, fitting all acnvities .Into a bureaucratic structure. Within this universe the human targets of military action are regularly defined as barbaric, subhuman, deserving of their fate and possibly even complicit in it: Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Guatemalan peasants, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqi, erb. As on the frontier, mass killing may be understood as necessary, a moral imperative to ensure human survival and save "civilization." Viewed accordingly, forces giving expression to racial supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia converge with a cult of violence ... In technowar especially, all human conduct becomes managerial, clinical, distant, impersonal, rendering the carnage technologically rational; individual emotional responses, including the pain and suffering of victims, disappear from view. Even the most ruthless, bloody actions have no villains, insofar as all initiative vanishes within the organizational apparatus and the culture supporting it. War managers' ideology contains specialized military/technical discourses with their own epistemology, basically devoid of moral criteria. ... Words like "incursion" substitute for real armed attacks, "body counts" for mass slaughter, "civilian militias" for death squads. The very structure of language helps to establish a moral and political gulf between perpetrators and victims, between war criminals and the crimes they commit. In general those who plan do not kill, and those who kill are merely following orders-and they too are usually shielded from psychological immediacy by the mechanism of technowar.
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Empire = Capitalism
IMPERIALISM IS NOW ADAPTED TO A SPECIFIC CAPITALIST LOGIC. THE QUESTION OF THE STATE OR CAPITALISM IS NOT SPECIFIC ENOUGH TO ADDRESS THIS DETAILED LOGIC. TO UNDERSTAND NEW IMPERIALISM WE MUST ADDRESS THE ONTOLOGICAL QUESTION OF BOTH Borst 2006 Allan G. Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The New Imperialism, or the Economic Logic of Late Postmodernism 2006 PMC 16., Review of: David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. ]-AC The book's identity takes its shape and its major contributions are made once Harvey establishes his concept of "capitalist imperialism." The basic assertion is that if the United States is the new imperialism, then this imperialism is in turn a specifically capitalist one. According to Harvey's diagnosis of current global trends, this new imperialism marks a contradictory fusion of "the politics of
state and empire" (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and "the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time" (imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). (26)
This complex definition clearly echoes the claims of Harvey's earlier books, especially The Limits to Capital (1982), The Condition of Postmodernity, and Spaces of Capital (2001). Consequently, the new imperialism epitomizes Harvey's long-developing thesis that adjoins a capitalist state apparatus with the ideological and geographical construction of space and time. These often contradictory, always dialectical impulses and motivations that push the state or the capitalist market toward one agenda or another are as crucial to Harvey's argument as they are problematic for global stability. That Harvey identifies the United States as the centrifuge of globalization is not surprising, nor is the association of the United States with an empire or imperial power. But Harvey overtly rejects claims found in other globalization scholarship that suggest that capitalism is the mere handmaiden of U.S. state power or vice versa. Initially, these rejections appear to achieve a clever sleight-of-hand and reveal Harvey's wariness of an either/or logic. "Capitalist imperialism" is not about capitalism or the state setting the imperial agenda. Instead, Harvey considers the neoliberal U.S. empire to be a product of capitalism and the state simultaneously vying for control. Employing the mix of geography and Marxist criticism that he calls "historical-geographical materialism" (1), Harvey claims that most discussions of capitalism and state hegemony perform oversimplified misreadings of the global order. Harvey's book suggests that what the United States has been doing around the globe should be subordinated to how these military, political, and economic maneuvers have been and continue to be made if we are to understand the "new imperialism." ... The fundamental point is to see the territorial and the capitalist logics of power as distinct
from each other. Yet it is also undeniable that the two logics intertwine in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. ... the alliance between politicians and capitalists manages a balance of state
power and capitalism that is always already unstable. This inherent instability always threatens to transform the state and capitalism into their own gravediggers.
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Humans are capable not only of saving their own life, but also of sacrificing it; they are capable of running the risk of losing their life and even of giving it up in passive resignation. Such a free and differentiated approach attests to the fact that humans do not identify what they intrinsically are with their physical existence; somehow they can confirm their humanity independently of their own survival, sometimes even against it. Evidently, they strive to exist somewhat differently than a biological entity, trying
to transcend their physical existence. To put it in positive terms: they strive for a spiritually independent existence. Only on such a basis is it possible to compare life with other values and freely avail oneself of it. This spiritual existence implements a purely human possibility of selftranscendence through a principal attachment to values. Humans
can sacrifice or save their life because of something that exceeds the value of biological life. That is, because of values towards which their life aspires, on which it is based, in which humans invest, with which they identify themselves, and to which they attach supreme meaning. Only a threat to such values "sublime" or "mundane", but always vitally important constitutes an extreme situation characteristic of man. If the principal values of his life have been destroyed or devalued, ones bare life retains value only if and as one is capable of retaining at least some hope of discovering or creating new values. Then life becomes, provisionally, a supreme value only in the name of those unknown values and in linkage with them. From a human viewpoint, mere survival does not appear to be an end in itself. It is not something absolute or unconditioned, but rather something to which one can assume a personal attitude; that is, one which is not arbitrary but spiritually free and connected with values. The fact that one carries within oneself something one protects more than ones own life and without which ones life would lose its meaning and humanity points to the conclusion that, unlike other live beings, ones specific extreme situation involves a threat to values which one regards as supreme. A threat to life is perceived by humans as an extreme situation only insofar as it jeopardizes also their possibility of living for certain values. In a situation of a total value vacuum and hopelessness life tends to become virtually irrelevant to a human person. Thus, one may attach to a certain value, rather than to ones bare life, that which is intrinsically ones own, ones most profound identity, namely, independence and integrity. This reveals the ontologically unique spiritual nature of the person. What seems to be significant in extreme human situations, therefore, is not any boundary of human potential for biological survival, but rather a limit of this or that individuals value orientation and attachment.
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A2: Democracy Checks US Imperialism/Militarism Democracy has not served as a check on US imperialism and militarism
Chalmers Johnson, (Prof., Emeritus, U. California, San Diego), LESSONS FROM IRAQ, 2008, 21. A dominant power with satellites, not colonies, is the sort of empire the United States has created and is now trying to maintain--by way of its military forces and its bases, and threats such as those it issues routinely against Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, the Palestinians, and other regimes we don't approve of. Over half a million U.S. troops, spies, contractors, dependents, and others are now stationed on some 737 military bases located in more than 130 countries, according to official Pentagon inventories. Many of these foreign countries are presided over by dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision to let the United States in. To run this empire, the president relies mostly on the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and has assumed powers specifically denied him by the Constitution. A Republican-dominated Congress simply abdicated its responsibilities to balance the power of the executive branch; despite the Democratic sweep in the 2006 election, it remains to be seen whether these tendencies can be reversed or controlled.
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A2: Imperialism Good Democracy US military presence collapses the credibility of local democratic activists
Joshua Geltzer, (Ph.D., War Studies, Kings College, London), U.S. COUNTER-TERRORISM STRATEGY AND AL-QAEDA: SIGNALING AND THE TERRORIST WORLDVIEW, 2010, 126-127. Before 9/11, the push for democratic reform in the Muslim world was marked by a distinct and gathering momentum. As Islamists' faltering ideology was giving way to a search for a new social compact', 'respect for human rights and an aspiration for a Muslim version of democracy' were finding unprecedented, though admittedly still fragile, support in countries like Algeria, Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, among others. [D]emocratic references invoked by the moderates' were gradually growing more frequent and more accepted. America's patently well-intentioned push for democracy actually stifled that momentum, as indigenous advocates for democracy became tarred by their association with America and with a conception of democracy that was associated, from the perspective of America's audience, with the USA.
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A2: Foreign Democracy Checks US Imperialism US basing agreements have undermined foreign democracies
Catharine Lutz, (Prof., International Studies, Brown U.), ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL, Mar. 16, 2009. Retrieved Jan. 17, 2010 from http://www.japanfocus.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3086. Finally, US military and civilian personnel work to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access. They have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing, US nuclear weapons, and a more-than-defensive military in the service of US wars, in the case of Japan. Military diplomacy with local civil and military elites is conducted not only to influence such legislation but also to shape opinion in what are delicately called host countries. US military and civilian officials are joined in their efforts by intelligence agents passing as businessmen or diplomats; in 2005, the US Ambassador to the Philippines created a furor by mentioning that the US has 70 agents operating in Mindanao alone.
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AT: Politics-Based DA
Politics are the staple of Empire. Rejecting our plan because of the supposed impact of a disadvantage is simply a method of justifying Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 33 Empire opposes today may present more of an ideological threat than a military challenge, but nonetheless the power of Empire exercised through force and all the deployments that guarantee its effectiveness are already very advanced technologically and solidly consolidated politically.
Reliance on empirics and cost benefit analysis props up a specific, liberal view of the world. This epistemology closes off alternate views and props up the view that US political views are necessary and inevitable. Wedeen in 2k7 (Lisa, Professor of Political Science Lisa Wedeen specializes in comparative politics, the
Middle East, political theory, feminist theory, and qualitative methods, Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East Social Science Research Council, June 14-15, 2007, http://www.ssrc.org/workspace/images/crm/new_publication_3/%7B8a197abf-ed60de11-bd80-001cc477ec70%7D.pdf)
... the circulation of formal methodologies and game theoretic arguments could have the indirect effect of
working on behalf of an undertheorized elision between science and liberalism . By combining empirical research with nonempirical techniques of logic and pure mathematics, even abstract formal models required practitioners to hold assumptions (about the individual, cognition, and what democracy is) that were congenial to both projects. Terms like trade-offs, cost-benefit analysis, and equilibria could appear as neutral variables or consensually accepted standards rather than the product of a distinct political context . Sharing these assumptions has helped constitute a community that is epistemological (in the sense that it directs how we know what we know), methodological (in the sense that members adhere to the same sets of processes in producing and evaluating results), and
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ontological (members of the group self-identify as participants in a community of argument whose conditions make questioning basic assumptions seem irrelevant, if not silly or embarrassing). Agreement on the procedures for research seems to entail distinguishing between descriptive and causal inferences and according the latter greater prestige; treating the individual as the unit of analysis and identification; presupposing a world in which it is sufficient to depict agents as if they act only instrumentally; and taking initial interpretations as descriptive facts or raw data, rather than information mediated through the experience of a particular researcher. To conclude this section: Epistemological assumptions and liberal political commitments get constituted in and through the workings of political science.22 Dominant scholarly production in political science rests on particular views of science as the ultimate form of knowledge and liberalism as the desirable kind of politics. The positivist insistence on separating fact from value, moreover, obscures how science is itself an exalted value. Deciding what results
political scientists want to explain (e.g., contested elections and procedures in place to ensure them, peace among democracies, conflict avoidance) can be seen in current texts as simultaneously politically relevant and devoid of value. As political science has
become more scientific, liberal values have seemed to retreat into the background or been partially concealed by an emphasis on methods over content. Yet political science remains implicated in reproducing the liberal moral-political world in which practitioners live, in part by enacting the norms of proceduralism through which political projects are selected for inquiry, imagined into existence, and sustained. And scholars everyday enmeshments in institutional relationshipsthe pleasures of status, funding, approval, inclusion, prominence, job security and respecthave also worked to foreclose alternative political visions, while defining what is valid, good, and praiseworthy.
An imperialism based in the politics of fear is a central legitimizing apparatus of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 323 The society of the spectacle rules by wielding an age-old weapon. Hobbes recognized long ago that for effective domination the Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear. 24 For Hobbes, fear is what binds and ensures social order, and still today fear is the primary mechanism of control that fills the society of the spectacle.25 Although the spectacle seems to function through desire and pleasure (desire for commodities and pleasure of consumption), it really works through the communication off earor rather, the spectacle creates forms of desire and pleasure that are intimately wedded to fear. In the vernacular of early modern European philosophy, the communication of fear was called superstition. And indeed the politics of fear has always been spread through a kind of superstition. What has changed are the forms and mechanisms of the superstitions that communicate fear. The spectacle of fear that holds together the postmodern, hybrid constitution and the media manipulation of the public and politics certainly takes the ground away from a struggle over the imperial constitution. It seems as if there is no place left to stand, no weight to any possible resistance, but only an implacable machine of power.
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Not Sustainable
EMPIRE IS FULL OF UNSUBSTANTIATED ASSERTIONS James Petras, professor of sociology, Binghampton University, Empire With Imperialism, http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/negri010102.htm
Empire (*) is a strange book. At a time when the U.S. is the only super power, when almost fifty percent of the 500 biggest multi-nationals are U.S. owned and headquartered, and Washington is leading a war of intervention against Afghanistan (after previous interventionary wars in the Balkans, Central America (Panama), Carribean (Grenada) and proxy wars in Colombia (Plan Colombia) and earlier Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, the authors of this widely praised book tell us that imperialism is a thing of the past. They argue that "Empire" is a post-imperialist phenomena in which power is dispersed, and no single nation can control the "empire." Moreover they argue that "empire" is a positive advance in world history "The thing (sic) we call Empire is actually an enormous historical improvement over the international system and imperialism." After 413 pages of text and 57 pages of notes the best the authors can do in discussing "empire" is to tell us that "In this smooth space (?) of Empire there is no place of power - it is everywhere and nowhere. Empire is a Utopia or really a non-place." (p. 190). Without a clear notion of the agents of "empire" nor its dynamic in the real existing imperial states and their corporations, we are told that Empire is imperial but not imperialist, that the U.S. Constitution is imperial and not imperialist. From this they deduce (and we learn) that the U.S. Constitution is imperial because (in contrast to imperialism's project always to spread its power linearly in closed spaces and invade, destroy and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty) "the U.S. constitutional project is constructed on the model of re-articulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular networks across an unbounded terrain. The contemporary idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project" (p. 182). In other words, this celebration of Empire, is also a celebration of U.S. constitutionalism (the idea to be exact) which is a model for "democratizing" the Empire. The study disposes of classes and class conflict as outdated and imprecise, and substitutes the notion of "biopolitical production multitudes" - a term which is never clearly delineated and is without any historical or empirical specificity. Apart from "multitudes" there are no designated agencies for the announced but unspecified "revolution". The program of this novel revolution is not very different form that embraced by welfare state social democrats. Much has been written about the "sweep of the book, its theoretical grandeur". Frederic Jameson, Hardt's colleague at Duke, calls it "the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new Millennium." Hyperbole aside, few of the literary reviewers have commented on the lack of historical and empirical evidence to buttress their innumerable and unsubstantiated assertions.
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Monetary flows are investments from Empire to control populations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 346 As national monetary structures tend to lose any characteristics of sovereignty, we can see emerging through them the shadows of a new unilateral monetary reterritorialization that is concentrated at the political and financial centers of Empire, the global cities. This is not the construction of a universal monetary regime on the basis of new productive localities, new local circuits of circulation, and thus new values; instead, it is a monetary construction based purely on the political necessities of Empire. Money is the imperial arbiter, but just as in the case of the imperial nuclear threat, this arbiter has neither a determinate location nor a transcendent status. Just as the nuclear threat authorizes the generalized power of the police, so too the monetary arbiter is continually articulated in relation to the productive functions, measures of value, and allocations of wealth that constitute the world market. Monetary mechanisms are the primary means to control the market.
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A2: Courts CP
Courts do not check other institutions in comparison to justice they are an assemblage of Empire and thus our plan ought not be rejected because a courts counterplan will supposedly make the 1AC more just. It will simply redeploy the 1AC in Empires vision, turning the entire solvency and the case. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 38 It is clear that international or supranational courts are constrained to follow this lead. Armies and police anticipate the courts and preconstitute the rules of justice that the courts must then apply. The intensity of the moral principles to which the construction of the new world order is entrusted cannot change the fact that this is really an inversion of the conventional order of constitutional logic. The active parties supporting the imperial constitution are confident that when the construction of Empire is sufficiently advanced, the courts will be able to assume their leading role in the definition of justice. For now, however, although international courts do not have much power, public displays of their activities are still very important. Eventually a new judicial function must be formed that is adequate to the constitution of Empire. Courts will have to be transformed gradually from an organ that simply decrees sentences against the vanquished to a judicial body or system of bodies that dictate and sanction the interrelation among the moral order, the exercise of police action, and the mechanism legitimating imperial sovereignty.
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A2: Agent CP
Empire uses international organizations in the paradigm of the new world order. Only the US can change the Mindset needed to end US empirical assumptions. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Professor at Duke University and Professor at the University of Pagua, Empire, 2000, p. 31 The U.N. organizations, along with the great multi- and transnational finance and trade agencies (the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT, and so forth), all become relevant in the perspective of the supranational juridical constitution only when they are considered within the dynamic of the biopolitical production of world order. The function they had in the old international order, we should emphasize, is not what now gives legitimacy to these organizations. What legitimates them now is rather their newly possible function in the symbology of the imperial order. Outside of the new framework, these institutions are ineffectual. At best, the old institutional framework contributes to the formation and education of the administrative personnel of the imperial machine, the dressage of a new imperial elite.
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A2: Discourse
A simple negation or refusal is not enough - we must be pragmatic and affirmative in order to overcome Empire - Both create best Solvency.
Hardt professor of lit at Duke and Negri professor of polisci at University of Paris 1994 (Michael and Antonio, Labor of Dionysus: A critique of state-form, page 5-6) (BLUEUN2114) The second element of this Marxist method, along with recognizing the present state of things, is grasping what Marx calls "the real movement that destroys" that present state. The Marxist critique of the State, in other words, must grasp the real social forces in motion that sabotage and subvert the structures and mechanisms of rule. At the base of this critique, we assume, as Marx did, the idea and the experience of living labor, always subjugated but always liberating itself. Living labor inheres in capital; it is closed in the very institutions where it is born, but continually it manages to destroy them. The critique must thus reach the level of antagonism and revolutionary subjectivities, defining and redefining their changing figures, showing how their movement and their progressive transformations continually conflict with and destroy the new arrangements of law and the State. These are the two faces of a critique of the State-form that takes communism, "the real movement that destroys the present state of things," as its point of departure. As a first hypothesis, then, we could pose juridical communism as a method of thought outside of any dimension of the instrumental rationality of law and the State, a method that destroys that rationality. A negative method, however, is not enough. The critique must also pose a project. Communism must be conceived as a total critique in the Nietzschean sense: not only a destruction of the present values, but also a creation of new values; not only a negation of what exists, but also an affirmation of what springs forth. Critique of the State-form thus means also proposing an effective alternative. This positive aspect of a Marxist critique must also assume as its basis the idea and experience of living labor. Living labor is the internal force that constantly poses not only the subversion of the capitalist process of production but also the construction of an alternative. In other words, living labor not only refuses its abstraction in the process of capitalist valorization and the production of surplus value, but also poses an alternative schema of valorization, the self-valorization of labor. Living labor is thus an active force, not only of negation but also of affirmation. The subjectivities produced in the processes of the self-valorization of living labor are the agents that create an alternative sociality. (In chapter 7 we will examine what we call "the prerequisites of communism" already existing in contemporary society.) The expression and affirmation of the power of the collectivity, the multitude, as an unstoppable movement of the material transformation of the social organization of labor and the norms that guarantee its effectiveness are the animating force in the transcendental schema of juridical communism. This schema is transcendental in the strong sense. In other words, it is not formal but ontological, not teleological but pragmatic; it does not point toward any necessity nor trust in any transition, but rather presupposes always new processes of struggle, always new configurations of productivity, and new expressions of constituent power. As we said, in its negative aspect the critique of the State-form takes communism as its point of departure, but now in its affirmative aspect, the critique realizes communism as its end point.
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Policy oriented debates are key to establish substance based discussion with relevant and recognizable argumentation McClean 1 (McClean, Ph.D. Philosophy: The New School for Social Research, David E, The Cultural Left
And The Limits of Social Hope, Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. 2001 Conference]
.... Rather, what makes this prose bad is its utter lack of relevance to extant and critical policy debates, the
passage of actual laws, and the amendment of existing regulations that might actually do some good for someone else. The writers of this bad prose are too interested in our arrival at some social place wherein we will finally emerge from our "inauthentic" state into something called "reality ." Most of this stuff, of course,
comes from those steeped in the Continental tradition (particularly post-Kant). While that tradition has much to offer and has helped shape my own philosophical sensibilities, it is anything but useful when it comes to truly relevant philosophical analysis, and no selfrespecting Pragmatist can really take seriously the strong poetry of formations like "authenticity looming on the ever remote horizons of fetishization." What Pragmatists see instead is the hope that we can fix some of the social ills that face us if
we treat policy and reform as more important than Spirit and Utopia . Like light rain released from pretty clouds too high in the atmosphere, the substance of this prose dissipates before it can reach the ground and be a useful component in a discussion of medicare reform or how to better regulate a pharmaceutical industry that bankrupts senior
citizens and condemns to death HIV patients unfortunate enough to have been born in Burkina Faso - and a regulatory regime that permits this. It is often too drenched in abstractions and references to a narrow and not so merry band of
other intellectuals (Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Lukcs, Benjamin) to be of much use to those who are the supposed subject matter of this preternatural social justice literature. Since I have no particular allegiance to these other
intellectuals, no particular impulse to carry their water or defend their reputations, I try and forget as much as I can about their writings in order to make space for some new approaches and fresh thinking about that important question that always faces us "What is to be done?" I am, I think, lucky to have taken this decision before it had become too late. One might argue with me
that these other intellectuals are not looking to be taken seriously in the construction of solutions to specific socio-political problems. They are, after all, philosophers engaged in something called philosophizing. They are, after all, just trying to be good culture critics. ... That is to say, they are not easily explained at all. Take Habermas, whose writings are admittedly the most relevant of the group. I cannot find in Habermas's lengthy
narratives regarding communicative action, discourse ethics, democracy and ideal speech situations very much more than I have found in the Federalist Papers, or in Paine's Common Sense, or in Emerson's Self Reliance or Circles. I simply don't find the concept of
uncoerced and fully informed communication between peers in a democratic polity all that difficult to understand, and I don't much see the need to theorize to death such a simple concept, particularly where the only persons that are apt to take such narratives seriously are already sold, at least in a general sense. Of
course, when you are trying to justify yourself in the face of the other members of your chosen club (in Habermas's case, the Frankfurt School) the intricacy of your explication may have less to do with simple concepts than it has to do with parrying for respectability in the eyes of your intellectual brethren. But I don't see why the rest of us need to partake in an insular debate that has little to do with anyone that is not very much interested in the work of early critical theorists such as Horkheimer or Adorno, and who might see their insights as only modestly relevant at best. Not many self-respecting engaged political scientists in this country
actually still take these thinkers seriously, if they ever did at all. .... But I have not yet found in anything Foucault wrote or said how such observations may be translated into a political movement or hammered into a political document or theory (let alone public policies) that can be justified or founded on more than an arbitrary aesthetic experimentalism. In fact, Foucault would have shuddered if any one ever did, since he thought that
anything as grand as a movement went far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly rehabilitate Habermas, for at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the abstractions of various Marxian-Freudian social critiques. Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the
eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be
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relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. ...As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations...Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. .... We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character
of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and
doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
We have an external impact-engagement with state policy is critical to influence the government and prevent war WALT 1991 (Stephen, Professor at the University of Chicago, International Studies Quarterly 35)
A recurring theme of this essay has been the twin dangers of separating the study of security affairs from the academic world or of shifting the focus of academic scholarship too far from red-world issues. The danger of war will be with us for some time to come. and states will continue to aquire militarv forces for a variety of purposes. Unless one believes that ignorance is preferable to expertise, the value of independent national security scholars should be apparent. Indeed, historv suggests that countries that suppress debate on national security matters are more likely to blunder into disaster. because misguided policies cannot be evaluated and stooped in - time. As in other areas of puhlic policv. academic experts in security studies can help in several ways. In the short term, academics are well dace to evaluate current programs. because thev face less pressure to support official policy. The long-term effects of academic involvement may be even more significant: academic research can help states learn from past mistakes and can provide the theoretical innovations that produce better policv choices in the future. Furthermore. their role in training the new generation of experts gives academics an additional avenue of influence. Assuming they perform these tasks responsibly, academics will have a positive-albeit gradual-impact on how states deal with the problem of war in the future.
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effort to locate realism within a conservative, rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to provide reformist strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves. The progressive purpose which motivates the critique of realism in these perspectives ultimately generates a bias which undermines their own ability to generate effective strategies of transition. In constructivism, this bias appears in its most limited version, producing strategies so divorced from the obstacles presented by the current structure of international politics that they threaten to become counter-productive. In critical theory it moves a stage further, producing strategies so abstract that one is at a loss to determine what they actually imply in terms of
the current structure of international politics. And, in post-modernism, it reaches its highest form producing an absence of such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at which we are left with nothing but critique. Against this failure,
realism contains the potential to act as the basis of a more constructive approach to international relations, incorporating many of the strengths of reflectivism and yet avoiding its weaknesses. It appears , in the final analysis, as an opening within which some synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism, of conservatism and progressivism, might be built.
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instrumental rationality as equivalent with the rationality of domination, and this rationality with an increasingly seamless bureaucratic order, no room existed any longer for a concrete or effective political form of opposition: Horkheimer would thus ultimately embrace a quasi-religious yearning for the totally other
while Adorno became interested in a form of aesthetic resistance grounded in negative dialectics. Their great work initiated a radical change in critical theory, but its metaphysical subjectivism surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions. ...9 Appropriating the Enlightenment for
modernity calls for reconnecting with the vernacular. This does not imply some endorsement of antiintellectualism. Debates in highly specialized fields, especially those of the natural sciences, obviously demand
expertise and insisting that intellectuals must reach the masses has always been a questionable strategy. The subject under discussion should define the language in which it is discussed and the terms employed are valid insofar as they illuminate what cannot be said in a simpler way. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, saw the matter differently.
They feared being integrated by the culture industry, avoided political engagement, and turned freedom into the metaphysical-aesthetic preserve of the connoisseur. They became increasingly incapable of appreciating the egalitarian impulses generated by the Enlightenment and the ability of its advocatesBen Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and Rousseauto argue clearly and with a political purpose.1 Thus, whether or not their critical enterprise was dialectically in keeping with the impulses of the past, its assumptions prevented them from articulating anything positive for the present or the future.
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It only belongs to either realm by exceeding each one in the direction of the other which means that, in their very heterogeneity, these two orders are undissociable: de facto and de jure [en fait et en droit]. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot
private, and so on. The order of this il faut does not properly belong either to justice or to law. and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism, or a triviality, one must recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the very foundations of law
such as they had previously been calculated or delimited. This was true for example in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. One cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, without at least some thoughtlessness and without forming the worst complicities. It is true that it is also necessary to re-elaborate, without
renouncing, the concept of emancipation, enfranchisement, or liberation while taking into account the strange structures we have been describing. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the grand geo-political scale, beyond all selfserving misappropriations and hijackings, beyond all determined and particular reappropriations of international law, other
areas must constantly open up that can at first resemble secondary or marginal areas. This marginality also signifies that a violence, even a terrorism and other forms of hostage taking are at work. The examples closest to us would be found in the area of laws [lois] on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception, bio-engineering, medical experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or micro-politics of drugs, homelessness, and so on, without forgetting; of course, the treatment of what one calls animal life, the immense question of so-called animality. On this last problem, the Benjamin text that I am coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this subject remain quite obscure or traditional.
Calculative thought is vital to ethics and survival. David Campbell, Prof. of International Politics @ University of Newcastle, 1999, MORAL SPACES:
RETHINKING ETHICS AND WORLD POLITICS, 56.
Levinas has also argued for a politics that respects a double injunction. When asked "Is not ethical obligation to the other a purely negative ideal, impossible to realize in our everyday being-in-the-world," which is governed by "ontological drives and practices"; and "Is ethics practicable in human society as we know it? Or is it merely an invitation to apolitical acquiescence?" Levinas's response
was that "of course we inhabit an ontological world of technological mastery and political self-preservation. Indeed, without these political and technological structures of organization we would not be able to feed mankind. This is the greatest paradox of human existence: we must use the ontological for the sake of the other, to ensure the survival of the other we must resort to the technico-political systems of means and ends."
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Empire = Unsustainable
US pursuit of empire is unsustainable Johnson 09 [Chalmers Johnson, president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, consultant for the CIA, author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, led the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do
So 6/30, http://www.commondreams.org/print/45] The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union. According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan. These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible. We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- ... three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us. 1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism ... "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen." What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster. According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of
... Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically
The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and
writes : "America is in unprecedented decline.
technology. ... the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency. Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantnamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.
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A critical social theory is concerned in particular with issues of power and justice and the ways that the economy; matters of race, class, and gender; ideologies; discourses; education; religion and other social institutions; and cultural dynamics interact to construct a social system (Beck-Gernsheim, Butler, & Puigvert, 2003; Flccha, Gomez, & Puigvert, 2003). Thus, in this context we seek to provide a view of an evolving criticality or a reconceptualized critical theory. Critical theory is never static; it is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and new problems and social circumstances.
The list of concepts elucidating our articulation of critical theory indicates a criticality informed by a variety of discourses emerging after the work of the Frankfurt School Indeed, some of the theoretical discourses, while referring to themselves as critical, directly call into question some of the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus, diverse theoretical traditions have informed our understanding of criticality and have demanded understanding of diverse forms of oppression including class, race, gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial, and ability-related concerns. The evolving notion of criticality we present is informed by, while critiquing, the post-discoursesfor example, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. In this context, critical theorists
become detectives of new theoretical insights, perpetually searching for new and interconnected ways of understanding power and oppression and the ways they shape everyday life and human experience. In this context, criticality and the research it supports are always evolving, always encountering new ways to irritate dominant forms of power, to provide more evocative and compelling insights. Operating in this way, an evolving criticality is always vulnerable to exclusion from the domain of approved modes of research. The forms of social change it supports always position it in some places as an outsider, an awkward detective always interested in uncovering social structures, discourses, ideologies, and epistemologies that prop up both the status quo and a variety of forms of privilege. In the epistemological domain, white, male, class elitist, heterosexist, imperial, and colonial privilege often operates by asserting the power to claim objectivity and neutrality. Indeed, the owners of such privilege often own the "franchise" on reason and rationality. Proponents of an evolving criticality possess a variety of tools to expose such oppressive power politics. Such proponents assert that critical theory is wellserved by drawing upon numerous liberatory discourses and including diverse groups of marginalized peoples and their allies in the nonhierarchical aggregation of critical analysts {Bello, 2003; Clark, 2002; Humphries, 1997). In the present era, emerging
forms of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism in the United States move critical theorists to examine the wavs American power operates under the cover of establishing democracies all over the world. Advocates of an evolving criticality argueas we do in more detail later in this chapterthat such neocolonial power must be exposed so it can be opposed in the United States and around the world. The American Empires justification in the name of freedom for undermining democratically elected governments from Iran (Kincheloe, 2004), Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to Liberia (when its real purpose is to acquire geopolitical advantage for future military assaults, economic leverage in international markets, and access to natural resources) must be exposed by critical-ists for what it isa rank imperialist sham (McLaren, 2003a, 2003b; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2002; McLaren & Martin, 2003). Critical researchers need to view their work in the context of living and working in a nation-state with the most powerful military-industrial complex in history that is shamefully using the terrorist attacks of September 11 to
advance a ruthless imperialist agenda fueled by capitalist accumulation by means of the rule of force (McLaren & Farahmandpur,2003). Chomsky (2003), for instance, has accused the U.S. government of the "supreme crime" of preventive war (in the case of its invasion of Iraq, the use of military force to destroy an invented or imagined threat) of the type that was condemned at Kuremburg. Others, like historian Arthur Schlesinger (cited in Chomsky, 2003), have likened the invasion of Iraq to Japan's "day of infamy'' that is, to the policy that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor. David G. Smith (2003) argues that such
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basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society.11 This
narrative does imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the end of empire only when the world is remade in our image.
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power and globalisation. Ferguson has described the period as 'Anglobalisation', pointing specifically to the connection between empire and an open international economy. 45 While similar arguments have been made within
international relations regarding the development of hegemonic power, these arguments tend to avoid the questions concerning the imperial nature of Britain's hegemony in comparison to today.46 While it is certainly not the case that all historical empires were 'empires of trade', the comparison between the present system and the nineteenth century is useful for the parallels with the global economy and the ideology surrounding the pursuit of an open economy. The guiding role of British informal rule in the nineteenthc entury was to 'open up' states to British commerce47 A nd the role of this facet of globalisation is no different, according to both proponents and critics. Along these lines as well, the force of American 'soft power', as Nye has described it, should not be
seen as detrimental to empire, but conducive of it.48 Soft power, in essence, also forms one part of a drive to gain a legitimate basis for imperial rule.
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intensely concerned with the need to understand the various and complex ways that power operates to dominate and shape consciousness. Power, critical theorists have learned, is an extremely ambiguous topic that demands detailed study and analysis. A consensus seems to be emerging among criticalists that power is a basic constituent of human existence that works to shape the oppressive and productive nature of the human tradition. Indeed, we are all empowered and we are all unempowered, in that we all possess abilities and we are all limited in the
attempt to use our abilities. Because of limited space, we will focus here on critical theory's traditional concern with the oppressive aspects of power, although we understand that an important aspect of critical research focuses on the productive aspects of power its ability to empower, to establish a critical democracy, to engage marginalized people in the rethinking of their sociopolitical role (Apple, 19%; Fiske, 1993; A.M.A. Freire. 2000; Giroux, 1997; Macedo, 1994; Nicholson & Seidman, 1995). In the context of
oppressive power and its ability to produce inequalities and human suffering, Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony is central to critical research. Gramsci understood that dominant power in the 20th century was not always exercised simply by physical force but also was expressed through social psychological attempts to win people's consent to domination through cultural institutions such as the media, the schools, the family, and the church. Gramscian hegemony recognizes that the winning of popular consent is a very complex process and must be researched carefully on a case-by-case basis. Students and researchers of power,
educators, sociologists, all of us are hegemonized as our field of knowledge and understanding is structured by a limited exposure to competing definitions of the sociopolitical world. The hegemonic field, with its bounded sociopsychological horizons,
garners consent to an inequitable power matrixa set of social relations that are legitimated by their depiction as natural and inevitable. In this context, critical researchers note that hegemonic consent is never completely
established, as it is always contested by various groups with different agendas (Grossberg, 1997; Lull, 1995; McLaren. 1995a, 1995b; McLaren, Hammer, Reilly, & Shollc, 1995; West, 1993). We note here that Gramsci famously understood Marx's concept of laws of tendency as implying a new immanence and a new conception of necessity and freedom that cannot be grasped within a mechanistic model of determination (Bensaid.2002). A Reconceptualized Critical Theory of Power: Ideology. Critical theorists understand that the
formation of hegemony cannot be separated from the production of ideology. If hegemony is the larger effort of the powerful to win the consent of their "subordinates," then ideological hegemony involves the cultural forms, the meanings, the rituals, and the representations that produce consent to the status quo and individuals' particular places within it. Ideology vis-a-vis hegemony moves critical inquirers beyond explanations of domination that have used terms such as "propaganda" to describe the ways media, political, educational, and other sociocultural productions coercively manipulate citizens to adopt oppressive meanings. A reconceptualized critical research endorses a much more subtle, ambiguous, and situationally specific form of domination that refuses the propaganda model's assumption that people are passive, easily manipulated victims. Researchers operating with an awareness of this hegemonic ideology understand that dominant ideological practices and discourses shape our vision of reality (Lemke, 1995,1998). Thus, our notion of hegemonic ideology is a critical form of epistemological constructivism buoyed by a nuanced understanding of powers complicity in the constructions people make of the world and their role in it (Kincheloc, 1998). Such an awareness corrects earlier delineations of ideology as a monolithic unidirectional entity that was imposed on individuals by a secret cohort of ruling-class czars. Understanding domination in the context of concurrent struggles among different classes, racial and gender groups, and sectors of capital, critical researchers of ideology explore the ways such competition engages different visions, interesls, and agendas in a variety of social locales venues previously thought to be outside the domain of ideological struggle (Brosio, 1994; Steinberg, 2001). <309-310>
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Empire = Unsustainable
The US empire cannot be sustained There is an imbalance of hegemony and political force. Ikenberry in 4 (G. John, Prof. of Politics and Intl. Affairs at Princeton University, Council on Foreign
Relations, Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59727/g-john-ikenberry/illusions-of-empire-defining-the-newamerican-order?page=show)pl
Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire presents a case against the recent unilateral impulses in U.S. foreign policy. According to Barber, empire is not inherent in U.S. dominance but is, rather, a temptation -- one to which the Bush administration has increasingly succumbed. In confronting terrorism, Washington has vacillated between appealing to law and undermining it. Barber's thesis is that by invoking a right to unilateral action, preventive war, and regime change, the United States has undermined the very framework of cooperation and law that is necessary to fight terrorist anarchy. A foreign policy oriented around the use of military force against rogue states, Barber argues, reflects a misunderstanding of the consequences of global interdependence and the character of democracy. Washington cannot run a global order driven by military action and the fear of terrorism. Simply put,
American empire is not sustainable. For Barber, the logic of globalization trumps the logic of empire: the spread of McWorld
undermines imperial grand strategy. In most aspects of economic and political life, the United States depends heavily on other states. The world is thus too complex and interdependent to be ruled from an imperial center . In an empire of fear, the United States attempts to order the world through force of arms. But this strategy is self-defeating: it creates hostile states
bent on overturning the imperial order, not obedient junior partners. Barber proposes instead a cosmopolitan order
of universal law rooted in human community: "Lex humana works for global comity within the framework of universal rights and law, conferred by multilateral political, economic, and cultural cooperation -- with only as much common military action as can be authorized by common legal authority; whether in the Congress, in multilateral treaties, or through the United Nations." Terrorist threats, Barber concludes, are best confronted with a strategy of "preventive democracy" -- democratic states working together to strengthen and extend liberalism. Barber's overly idealized vision of cosmopolitan global governance is less convincing, however, than his warnings about unilateral military rule. Indeed, he provides a useful cautionary note for liberal empire enthusiasts in two respects. First, the two objectives of liberal empire -- upholding the rules of the international system and unilaterally
employing military power against enemies of the American order -- often conflict. As Barber shows, zealous
policymakers often invoke the fear of terrorism to justify unilateral exercises of power that, in turn, undermine the rules and institutions they are meant to protect. Second, the threats posed by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are not enough
to legitimate America's liberal empire. During the Cold War, the United States articulated a vision of community and progress
within a U.S.-led free world, infusing the exercise of U.S. power with legitimacy. It is doubtful, however, that the war on terrorism, in which countries are either "with us or against us," has an appeal that can draw enough support to justify a U.S.-dominated order. Michael Mann also warns of a dangerous, and ultimately unsustainable, imperial turn in U.S. foreign policy.
This "new imperialism," he argues in Incoherent Empire, is driven by a radical vision in which unilateral military power enforces U.S. rule and overcomes global disorder. Mann believes that this "imperial project" depends on a wildly inflated measure of American power; the United States may have awesome military muscle, but its political and economic capabilities are less overwhelming. This imbalance causes Washington to overemphasize the use of force, turns the quest for empire into "overconfident and hyperactive militarism." Such militarism generates what Mann calls "incoherent empire," which undermines U.S. leadership and creates more, not fewer, terrorists and rogue states. In his distinguished scholarly work on the history of social power, Mann, a sociologist, has argued that four types of power
drive the rise and fall of states, nations, empires, regions, and civilizations: military, political, economic, and ideological. Applying these categories to the United States, Mann concludes that it is, in a jumble of metaphors, "a military giant, a back-seat economic driver, a political schizophrenic, and an ideological phantom." Mann acknowledges that the United States is a central hub of the world economy and that the role of the dollar as the primary reserve currency confers significant advantages in economic matters. But the actual ability of Washington to use trade and aid as political leverage, he believes, is severely limited, as was evident in its failure to secure the support of countries such as Angola, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan in the Security Council before the war in Iraq. Moreover, Washington's client states are increasingly unreliable, and the populations of erstwhile allies are inflamed with antiAmericanism. American culture and ideals, meanwhile, hold less appeal than they did in previous eras. Although the world still
embraces the United States' open society and basic freedoms, it increasingly complains about "cultural imperialism" and U.S. aggression. Nationalism and religious fundamentalism have forged deep cultures of resistance to an American
imperial project. Mann and Barber both make the important point that an empire built on military domination alone will not succeed. In their characterization, the United States offers security -- acting as a global leviathan to control the problems of a Hobbesian world - in exchange for other countries' acquiescence. Washington, in this imperial vision, refuses to play by the same rules as other
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governments and maintains that this is the price the world must pay for security. But this U.S.-imposed order cannot last. Barber points out that the United States has so much "business" with the rest of the world that it cannot rule the system without complex arrangements of cooperation. Mann, for his part, argues that military "shock and awe" merely increases resistance; he cites the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who long ago noted that raw power, unlike consensus authority, is "deflationary": the more it is used, the more rapidly it diminishes. The French essayist Emmanuel Todd believes that the long-term decline predicted by Mann and Barber has already started. In a fit of French wishful thinking, he argues in After the Empire that the United States' geopolitical
importance is shrinking fast. The world is exiting, not entering, an era of U.S. domination. Washington may want to
run a liberal empire, but the world is able and increasingly willing to turn its back on an ever less relevant United States. Todd's prediction derives from a creative -- but ultimately suspect -- view of global socioeconomic transformation. He acknowledges that the United States played a critical role in constructing the global economy in the decades after World War II. But in the process, Todd argues, new power centers with divergent interests and values emerged in Asia and Europe, while the United States' own economy and society became weak and corrupt. The soft underbelly of U.S. power is its reluctance to take casualties and to pay the costs of rebuilding societies that it invades. Meanwhile, as U.S. democracy weakens, the worldwide spread of democracy has bolstered resistance to Washington. As Todd puts it, "At the very moment when the rest of the world -- now undergoing a process of stabilization thanks to improvements in education, demographics, and democracy -- is on the verge of discovering that it can get along without America, America is realizing that it cannot get along without the rest of the world." Two implications follow from the United States' strange condition as "economically dependent and politically useless." First, the United States is becoming a global economic predator, sustaining itself through an increasingly fragile system of "tribute taking." It has lost the ability to couple its own economic gain with the economic advancement of other societies. Second, a weakened United States will resort to more desperate and aggressive actions to retain its hegemonic position. Todd identifies this impulse behind confrontations with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, in his most dubious claim, Todd argues that the corruption of U.S. democracy is giving rise to a poorly supervised ruling class that will be less restrained in its use of military force against other democracies, those in Europe included. For Todd, all of this
points to the disintegration of the American empire. Todd is correct that the ability of any state to dominate the international system depends on its economic strength. As economic dominance shifts, American unipolarity will eventually give way to a new distribution of power. But, contrary to Todd's diagnosis, the United States retains formidable
socioeconomic advantages. And his claim that a rapacious clique of frightened oligarchs has taken over U.S. democracy is simply bizarre. Most important, Todd's assertion that Russia and other great powers are preparing to counterbalance U.S. power misses the larger patterns of geopolitics. Europe, Japan, Russia, and China have sought to engage the United States strategically, not simply to resist it. They are pursuing influence and accommodation within the existing order, not trying to overturn it. In fact, the great powers worry more about a detached, isolationist United States than they do about a United States bent on global rule. Indeed, much of the pointed criticism of U.S. unilateralism reflects a concern that the United States will stop providing security and stability, not a hope that it will decline and disappear.
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Empire = Unsustainable
The US empire is on its way to collapse The Roman Empire and USSR prove. Johnson in 3 (Chalmers, President of Japan Policy Research Institute, The American Empire Project,
Interview with Chalmers Johnson, http://www.americanempireproject.com/johnson/johnson_interview.htm)pl
The United States is embarked on a path not so dissimilar from that of the former Soviet Union a little more than a decade ago. The Soviet Union collapsed for three reasons -- internal economic contradictions, imperial overstretch, and an inability to reform. In every sense, we are by far the wealthier of the two Cold War superpowers, so it
will certainly take longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But the equivalent of the economic sclerosis of the former USSR is to be found in our corrupt corporations, the regular looting by insiders of workers' pension funds, the revelations that not a single financial institution on Wall Street can be trusted, and the massive drain of manufacturing jobs to other countries. Imperial
overstretch is implicit in our empire of 725 military bases abroad , in addition to the 969 separate bases in the fifty
states. Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet system before it collapsed but he was stopped by entrenched interests in the Cold War system. The United States is not even trying to reform, but it is certain that vested interests here would
be as great or greater an obstacle. It is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun.
The few optimistic trends in the U.S. include the development of the powerful anti-globalization coalition that came into being in Seattle in November 1999 and that has subsequently evolved into an anti-war movement. The percentage of the public that does not get its information from network television but from the Internet and foreign newspapers is growing. Our wholly volunteer armed forces are composed of people who see the military as an opportunity, but they do not expect to be shot at. Now that the
president and his advisers are ordering them into savagely dangerous situations, it is likely that many soldiers will not reenlist. And civil society in the United States remains strong and influential. Nonetheless, it is only prudent to estimate that these trends may not be sufficient to counter the forces of militarism and imperialism in the country. The main prospect for the future of the world is that perpetual war waged by the United States against small countries it declares to be "rogue states" will lead to the slow growth of a coalition of enemies of the United States who will seek to weaken it and hasten its inevitable bankruptcy. This is the way the Roman Empire ended. The chief problem is that the only way an adversary of the United States can even hope to balance or deter the enormous
American concentration of military power is through what the Pentagon calls asymmetric warfare ("terrorism") and nuclear weapons. American belligerence has deeply undercut international efforts to control the nuclear weapons that already exist and has rendered the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty more or less moot (the U.S., in particular, has failed to take any actions it contracted to do under article 6, the reduction of stockpiles by the nuclear armed nations). The only hope for the planet is the isolation and neutralization of the United States by the international community. Policies to do so are underway in every democratic country on earth in quiet, unobtrusive ways. If the United States is not checkmated and nuclear war ensues, civilization as we know it will disappear and the United States will go into the history books along with the Huns and the Nazis as a scourge of human life itself.
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solidarity with a justice-oriented community. Here, critical research attempts to expose the forces that prevent individuals and groups from shaping the decisions that crucially affect their lives. In this way, greater degrees of autonomy and human agency can be achieved. In the first decade of the 21st century, we are cautious in our use of the term "emancipation" because, as many critics have pointed out, no one is ever completely emancipated from the sociopolitical context that has produced him or her . Concurrently, many
have used the term "emancipation" to signal the freedom an abstract individual gains by gaining access to Western reasonthat is, becoming reasonable. Our use of "emancipation" in an evolving criticality rejects any use of the term in this context In addition, many
have rightly questioned the arrogance that may accompany efforts to emancipate "others." These are important caveats and must be carefully taken into account by critical researchers. Thus, as critical inquirers who search for those forces that insidiously shape who we are, we respect those who reach different conclusions in their personal journeys (Butler, 1998; Cannella, 1997; Kellogg, 1998; Knobel, 1999; Steinberg & Kinchcloe, 1998; Weil, 1998).
Individual resistance to the discourse of empire is the only strategy. Even if it fails to collapse imperialism, it promises the individual can carve out a space for freedom Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr in 2k3 (University Professor and professor of English at DePauw University,
Science Fiction Studies #90 = Volume 30, Part 2 = July 2003, http://fs6.depauw.edu/~icronay/empire.htm)
This is the imperial Sprawl, ruled not through decrees and armies (well, mostly not through armies) but through communication/control networks that distribute virtual power. This power is internalized by imperial citizens as surely as if they had chips embedded in their brains. In Empire, subjectivity is multicentered, produced through institutions that are terminally unstable, always breaking down. As the integrity of social institutions (such as schools, families, courts, and prisons) fragments, and the once-clear subject-positions associated with them weaken, the call for imperial comprehensiveness is strengthened, inaugurating a comprehensive ideology, a finely distributed pragmatic myth of networked, globally interlocking power. This is the twenty-minutes-into-the-future of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, and Mamoru Oshii, where computerized communications operate 24/7, generating a mindscape of consuming subjects into which capitalist ideology feeds directly. It perpetually breaks down and reconstructs human consciousness, as in a Cadigan novel, into provisional target-identities to which the nostalgic, utopian dream of wholeness can be sold and resold perpetually in variant, sometimes mutually contradictory forms, and which can be hired to convey its fictions of sovereignty ever deeper into the self that once imagined it was itself sovereign. In this empire, there are infinite possibilities of projection, but only one reality. The most natural thing in the world is that the world appears to be politically united, that the market is global, and that power is organized throughout its universality. Imperial politics articulates being in its global extensiona great sea that only the winds and the current move. The neutralization of the transcendental imagination is thus the first sense in which the political in the imperial domain is ontological. (354) Since contemporary imperial power does not emanate from one center, but rather from the cyberspatial ganglia of postmodern metropoli, resistance manifests itself in the daily refusal on the part of "the multitude" to follow commands. For Hardt and Negri, revolution is neither possible nor desirable,
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Epistemology must be the starting point-Empire is maintained by excluding alternate ways of knowing throw a reliance on political science experts that naturalize the American way of life as good. Wedeen in 2k7 (Lisa, Professor of Political Science Lisa Wedeen specializes in comparative politics, the
Middle East, political theory, feminist theory, and qualitative methods, Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East Social Science Research Council, June 14-15, 2007, http://www.ssrc.org/workspace/images/crm/new_publication_3/%7B8a197abf-ed60de11-bd80-001cc477ec70%7D.pdf)
The late Edward Said (1978) famously underscored the connections between empire and distinct forms of
knowledge, and in the spirit of his book Orientalism, this essay also specifies the normative conditions, in this case in political science, that have helped make possible distinct visions of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. I want to argue that these visions are not simply embellishments of an imperial domination independently existing; they are an integral part of the project itself.4 Such a claim is not meant to suggest that all political scientists participate in reproducing possibilities for
empire, or that they do so single-handedly and deliberately. Thus this essay also takes issue with approaches that attribute political power to scholarly discourses without attending to the ways in which scholarship operates within broader discursive and institutional frameworks. Admittedly, it is by no means self-evident how political sciences complicities with U.S. empire
would jibe with the two aspects of political science I argue above are currently defining the disciplinethe convergence, or perhaps more historically accurate, the continuing coalescence in new forms, of science and liberalism. This
essay is devoted to fleshing out those links while considering how scholarly convictions, combined with the realities of U.S. foreign policy, have structured the terms in which the Middle East is understood and studied today. Part one explores the disciplines seemingly contradictory commitments to value-neutrality and liberal values. Part two foregrounds the constitutive relationship among science, liberalism, and empire in the making of modern Middle Eastern politics as an area of academic inquiry. One caveat worth noting from the outset: the words empire and imperialism are politically charged nouns these days. By empire I simply mean, following the Oxford English Dictionary, a state with extensive political and military dominion. In the age of nation-states, imperial states generally exercise this dominion over populations that are perceived (by conqueror and conquered) as different from (in the sense of ineligible for incorporation into) the dominant state exercising control. From the inception of the American Political Science Association in 1903 until the present, there have been repeated attempts within the association to transform the study of politics into an independent science (Ross 1991: 288; see also Heaney and Hansen 2006). Despite important variations among positivists and significant disagreements between positivists and nonpositivists (including what positivism means), efforts to make political
science a science have generally entailed separating facts from values, identifying law-like principles governing political action, and subjecting these rules to empirical tests. In this context, objectivity enjoys an aura of
self-evidencepractical agreement about what counts as a fact and the modes through which knowledge about facts are produced (Shapin and Schaffer 1985: 13-14). Committed to objectivity and value-free scholarship, dominant political sciences applications of positivist principles find expression in causal explanations that rely on a nomothetical understanding of what causation entails. Formulated by Hume and formalized by the prominent positivist, Carl Hempel, the task of science, in this view, is to discover a
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liberal politics (Ross 1991; Ricci 1984; Gunnell 1993). Like positivism, liberalism has embodied divergent ideas and been identified variously in different geographical and historical locations. Despite these variations, the liberal tradition in political science can nevertheless be characterized by four interrelated assumptions about the connection between human subjectivity and good government (Ricci 1984, 72-73). First, human beings are born as rights-bearing individuals. A good government is one that protects an individuals inalienable rights. Second, human beings are capable of thinking clearly and rationally. Good institutions are ones that cultivate human proclivities to reason. Third, individuals naturally come together and form groups in order to promote their interests and check those of rival factions. Good institutions are ones that encourage pluralistic interests while dampening potentially incendiary conflicts. Fourth, individuals are capable of creating governments that operate democratically, namely, that are responsive to the will of the people.5 Good democratic
governments are those that provide procedural mechanisms, such as elections, that enable people to exercise their will as individuals. Of course, liberalisms values, like those of any ideology, have never been borne out fully in practice. But whereas Marxism and other variants of socialism could be criticized for finding political expression in totalizing systems, liberalisms tenets have been
treated as separate from peoples experiences in liberal polities. Political scientists have helped make this separation secure by sequestering normative political theory from empirical studies, and by appealing to the authority of scientific discovery to justify commitments to piecemeal reforms. I am not arguing for better science,
however. Nor am I claiming that positivist social science is bad. Rather, I want to bracket the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the enterprise and consider how the insistence on separating fact from value, in particular, has contributed to three persistent
disciplinary moves. First, the division has excluded viewing science as a value in and of itself, indeed as a
metaphysic. Political scientists do not tend to ask how scientific knowledge operates to cultivate passionate belief or why science is inherently the most valuable form of knowledge. Second, the split between fact and value has prevented thinking
through how epistemological assumptions and nationalpolitical commitments coalesce to defend the stability of a liberal politicshow liberalism is itself ideological or hegemonic, and how political science helps to make it so. Or to put it differently, epistemologies have a politics, and knowledge production in political science tends to shore up certain liberal assumptions and aspirations even while overt prescription and bias are seen to be outside the objectivist goals of science. Third, the split between fact and value allows methodology , in particular, to be viewed as value neutral, as a technique devoid of normative assumptions. This view enables positivist political science to occupy the position of authorized (because disinterested) discoverer, teacher, and enforcer of what counts as true or justified statements about politics. The ultimate effect of this sequestering of fact-finding from rigorous philosophical examination has been that dominant epistemological communities are maintained by institutional and practical-discursive means rather than by any exclusive purchase such conceptual frameworks could have on the truth.
Disciplinary strategies (such as writing a methodological textbook designed to unify the discipline) and powerbrokering practices (such as dismissing out of hand arguments that are epistemologically reflexive) help establish the rules and devise the evaluative criteria by which statements about the world are considered knowledge or not. At the same time, these activities supply and enforce
norms about what may and may not be asked. They generally discourage scrutiny into the practices that bound and normalize a discipline, enabling certain kinds of knowledge to thrive while foreclosing or deauthorizing other ways of knowing. In other words, in addition to the tasks of socializing student-citizens and advising
government officials, political science, not surprisingly, operates as a discipline, reproducing the norms, prohibitions, conventions, and constraints that generate standards for identifying expertise. In political science, this expertise affirms the possibility and importance of pursuing value-free science, on the one hand, and the vision of a rationalist liberal politics, on the other.
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Discourse is Key
Discourse is a key site for understanding how power legitimates itself-in determining what can and cannot be said norms are created. McLaren and Kincheloe in 5 (Peter Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education and
Information Studies @ UCLA and Joe, professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Third Edition, Eds Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln)
Reconceptualized Critical Theory of Power: Linguistic/Discursive Power. Critical researchers have come to understand that language is not a mirror of society. It is an unstable social practice whose meaning shifts, depending upon the context in which it is used. Contrary to previous understandings, critical researchers appreciate the fact that language is not a neutral and objective conduit of description of the "real world." Rather, from a critical perspective, linguistic descriptions are not simply about the world but serve to construct it. With these linguistic notions in mind, criticalists begin to study the way language in the form of discourses serves as a form of regulation and domination. Discursive practices are defined as a set of tacit rules that regulate what can and cannot be said, who can speak with the blessings of authority and who must listen, whose social constructions are valid and whose are erroneous and unimportant. In an educational context, for example, legitimated discourses of power insidiously tell educators what books may be read by students, what instructional methods may be utilized, and what belief systems and views of success may be taught In all forms of research, discursive power validates particular research strategies, narrative formats, and modes of representation. In this context, power discourses undermine the multiple meanings of language, establishing one correct reading that implants a particular hegemonic/ideological message into the consciousness of the reader. This is a process often referred to as the attempt to impose discursive closure. Critical researchers interested in the construction of consciousness are very attentive to these power dynamics. Engaging and questioning the use value of particular theories of power is central to our notion of an evolving criticality (Blades, 1997; Gee, 1996; Lcmke, 1993; McWilliam & Taylor, 1996; Morgan, !996;Steinberg,2001).
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A2: Iran DA
THE FRAMING OF IRAN AS A THREAT ORIGINATES FROM OUR VIEW THAT THEY ARE AN UNPREDICTABLE OTHER IN NEED OF IMPERIAL CONTROL NOORANI IN 05 [ Yaseen, CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41, rhetoric of security]-AC The Iranian Revolution marked a dramatic watershed in this state of affairs. After a brief six-month period of secular nationalism, the government was taken over by religious forces. The secular nationalists were out of power and Iran became an Islamic republic. Suddenly the rules for interaction between Iran and the United States changed. Iran's leaders adopted an independent set of international relations goals, summed up in the phrase "neither East nor West." They expressed the desire to establish a true Islamic Republic based on religious law. They became deeply suspicious of U.S. motives, fearing that, as in 1953, the United States would attempt to reinstate the monarchy in order to regain the economic benefits enjoyed during the reign of the shah. More disturbing for American politicians was the attitude of the new Iranian leaders. They assumed an air of moral superiority, and were not interested in cooperation with Western nations on Western terms. Moreover, they seemed comfortable committing acts which outraged the United States with no apparent thought as to the possible consequences. This kind of behavior was inexplicable for most Americans. To add to the difficulty, in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, the Iranian leaders were not in full control of their own nation. Though identified by U.S. policy makers as elites, they had very little capacity for independent action on the foreign policy scene. As will be seen below, their ability to act vis--vis the United States was especially limited. In short, postRevolutionary Iran violated every tenet of the U.S. policy myth. Iran looked like a nation-state, but its political structure was, both under the shah and today, far more tenuous than that of any Western nation. After the revolution it was not concerned with the East-West struggle, preferring to reject both sides. Its national concerns transcended matters of military and economic power; it was often far more concerned about questions of ideology, morality and religious sensibility. Its elites were and continue to be informal power brokers and balancers of opinion rather than powerful actors able to enforce their will directly on the population. Moreover they have had to be extremely careful about contact with foreign powers, since their offices do not protect them from political attack as a result of such contact. All of this has given U.S. leaders fits. Iran does not conform to the set model of international behavior with which the foreign policy community is prepared to operate. As a result the Iranians are "crazy outlaws."
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A2 oil DA:
OIL IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF MIDDLE EASTERN IMPERIAL STRATEGY, your DA looks at the world of imperialism pre plan, we solve for the DisAd. Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. Imperialism and Global Political Economy, October 17, 2005, isj.org) Now, Marx famously said that if essence and appearance coincided then science would be superfluous. All these weighty strategic analyses could be so much epiphenomenal fluff, beneath which lies the reality of a secure and invincible American empire. Personally I find it more economical, however, to take this material at face value, and to treat it as evidence of the very long-standing preoccupation of US grand strategy to prevent the emergence of a hostile Great Power or coalition on the Eurasian landmass. This then supports the interpretation of the Iraq war offered by both Harvey and myself, namely that seizing Iraq would not simply remove a regime long obnoxious to the US, but would both serve as a warning to all states of the costs of defying American military power and, by entrenching this power in the Middle East, give Washington control of what Harvey calls the global oil spigot on which potential challengers in Europe and East Asia are particularly dependent.24
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"We" are participants in ordered worlds, not merely observers. The choice is whether we wish to recognize our own locations of ordered violence and participate in the struggle to resist their orderings, or whether we wish merely to observe violence in far-off worlds in order that our interventionary participation "out there" never destabilizes the ground upon which we stand. I suggest that we betray the spirit of transformatory struggle, despite all our expressions of support and even actions of professionalized expertise, if our own locations, within which are ordered and from which we ourselves order, remain unscrutinized.
THIS QUESTIONING OF WAR AS AN ONGOING PHENOMENA CAN WE FOSTER AN ETHICAL RELATIONSHIP TO THE OTHER THAT ADDRESSES MILITARISM IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES CHRIS J. CUOMO is assistant professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Cincinnati. She
teaches courses in ethics, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, environmental ethics, and lesbian and gay studies, fall 1996 *War is not just an event: reflections on the significance of everyday violence, Hypatia, v11.n4, pp30(16),]
Emphasizing the ways in which war is a presence, a constant undertone, white noise in the background of social existence, moving sometimes closer to the foreground of collective consciousness in the form of direct combat yet remaining mostly as an unconsidered given, allows for several promising analyses. To conclude, I will summarize four distinct benefits of feminist philosophical attention to the
constancy of military presence in most everyday contemporary life. 1) By considering the presence of war and militarism, philosophers and activists are able to
engage in a more effective, local, textured, multiplicitous discussion of specific examples and issues of militarism, especially during "peacetime" (when most military activities occur). These include environmental effects, such as the recent French decision to engage in nuclear testing; and effects on conceptions of gender and on the lives of women, such as the twelve-year-old Japanese girl who was recently raped by American soldiers stationed in
Okinawa.
2) Expanding the field of vision when considering the ethical issues of war allows us to better
perceive and reflect upon the connections among various effects and causes of militarism, and between aspects of everyday militarism and military activities that generally occur between declarations of war and the signing of peace
treaties. 3) As Robin Schott emphasizes, focusing
on the presence of war is particularly necessary given current realities of war, in an age in which military technology makes war less temporally, conceptually, and physically bounded, and in which civil conflict, guerilla wars, ethnic wars, and urban violence in response to worsening social
conditions are the most common forms of large-scale violence. 4) Finally, to return to a point which I raised earlier, it is my hope that a
more presence-based analysis of war can be a tool for noticing and understanding other political and ethical issues as presences, and not just events. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates relays the following:
"You've got to start with the families," [Colin Powell] says of the crisis in the inner cities, "and then you've got to fix education so these little bright-eyed five-year-olds, who are innocent as the day is long and who know right from wrong, have all the education they need. And you have to do both these things simultaneously. It's like being able to support two military conflicts simultaneously." Military metaphors, the worn currency of political discourse in this country, take on a certain vitality when he deploys them. (Indeed, there are those who argue that much of the General's allure stems from a sort of transposition of realms. "I think people are hungry for a military solution to inner-city problems," the black law professor and activist Patricia Williams says.) (Gates 1995, 77) How (where? when? why?) are institutions of law enforcement like military institutions? How is the presumed constant need for personal protection experienced by some constructed similarly to the necessity of national security? How does the constancy of militarism induce complacency toward or collaboration with authoritative violence? Looking
emphasize that an expanded conception of war is meant to disrupt crisis-based politics that distract attention from mundane, everyday violence that is rooted in injustice. Seeing the constant presence of militarism does not require that middle-class and other privileged Americans suddenly see themselves as constantly under siege. It does require the development of abilities to notice the extent to which people and ecosystems can be severely under siege by military institutions and values, even when peace seems present.
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A2: DA Impacts
THEIR AUTHORS PREDICTIONS OF INTERNATIONAL THREATS ARE ROOTED IN THE FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN AND TRYING TO CREATE A SECURE WORLD, Positive Peace solves for root cause Lipschutz 95 [Ronnie Lipschutz is a professor of politics at UC Santa Cruz. On Security Chapter 8, Negotiating the Boundaries of Difference and Security at Millenniums End. (p. ???)] What then, is the form and content of this speech act? The logic of security implies that one political actor must be protected from the depredations of another political actor. In international relations, these actors are territorially defined, mutually exclusive and nominally sovereign states. A state is assumed to be politically cohesive, to monopolize the use of violence within the defined jurisdiction, to be able to protect itself from other states, and to be potentially hostile to other states. Self-protection may, under certain circumstances, extend to the suppression of domestic actors, if it can be proved that such actors are acting in a manner hostile to the state on behalf of another state (or political entity). Overall, however, the logic of security is exclusionist: It proposes to exclude developments deemed threatening to the continued existence of that state and, in doing so, draws boundaries to discipline the behavior of those within and to differentiate within from without. The right to define such developments and draw such boundaries is, generally speaking, the prerogative of certain state representatives, as Wver points out. 3 Of course, security, the speech act, does draw on material conditions "out there." In particular, the logic of security assumes that state actors possess "capabilities," and the purposes of such capabilities are interpreted as part of the speech act itself. These interpretations are based on indicators that can be observed and measured--for example, numbers of tanks in the field, missiles in silos, men under arms. It is a given within the logic--the speech act--of security that these capabilities exist to be used in a threatening fashion--either for deterrent or offensive purposes--and that such threats can be deduced, albeit incompletely, without reference to intentions or, for that matter, the domestic contexts within which such capabilities have been developed. Defense analysts within the state that is trying to interpret the meanings of the other state's capabilities consequently formulate a range of possible scenarios of employment, utilizing the most threatening or damaging one as the basis for devising a response. Most pointedly, they do not assume either that the capabilities will not be used or that they might have come into being for reasons other than projecting the imagined threats. Threats, in this context, thus become what might be done, not, given the "fog of war," what could or would be done, or the fog of bureaucracy, what might not be done. What we have here, in other words, is "worst case" interpretation. The "speech act" security thus usually generates a proportionate response , in which the imagined threat is used to manufacture real weapons and deploy real troops in arrays intended to convey certain imagined scenarios in the mind of the other state. Intersubjectivity, in this case, causes states to read in others, and to respond to, their worst fears.
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